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“Using Earned Value Management for Project Managers” Course Project

Part One: Create an Action Plan for Effective Meetings

As you have seen in this module, it’s critical for project managers to plan, schedule, and run effective meetings, yet it’s not uncommon for team members and contributors to resist attending. You will now create an action plan to guide your efforts on the job so that you can plan to get the best value out of meetings and make sure they serve your projects well.

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

Complete the grid below.

Implementing Project Control

Project meetings play a very vital role in the implementation of project control due to the following reasons :

· Sharing updates on the project and discussing new information if there is some.

· Following up on the previous meeting’s agenda, on how are things tracking after the last meeting, any improvements or any correction of errors

· Discussing the financials, resources, tools, and deadlines can bring some new ideas to monitor, control or achieve them

Key Business Problem(s)

The problems that I have experienced a lot in past with my project meetings are the length of the meetings and specific agenda for the meetings. When we have our monthly or weekly meetings on our turnover or safety. We always start a meeting and the first thing we start with is this meeting is going to be short but once the discussion starts it always tends to go out the ballpark in time and also sometimes we get distracted quickly on our agendas too which also tends to make our meetings longer than expected.

Strategies

When planning for the effective meetings in coming days I will be planning on the agenda of the meeting and communicate with the team before the meeting is scheduled so that we can be more focused on the agenda for discussion rather than getting distracted and jumping to another topic for discussion and making it longer than the allocated time for the meeting.

Steps

· Planning on agendas and mentioning sub-agendas if there is any to be mentioned before the meeting so that we get on the right track on the meeting agendas.

· Having one person as a timekeeper who can signal or remind the host about the time left to complete the meeting.

· Getting a confirmation back from the team once they get the communication about the meetings schedule and its agendas.

Timeline

· Will get my team to send back a confirmation after getting an invite for a meeting.

· Allocating a certain time for meeting to last and assigning one person as a timekeeper in every meeting.

· Before every meeting laying out ground rules of the meeting and expectation or involvement from the team.

Measurement/Results

The timekeeper or tracker will inform us about how long we take for discussion.

Having a clear perspective on agenda before the meeting will help the team to do some brainstorm and have a very fruitful discussion.

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CEPM504: Using Earned Value Management for Project Managers

College of Engineering, Cornell University

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Part Two: Calculate Planned Cost, Actual Cost, and Earned Value

In this part of the course project, you will work with an existing budget from a completed project. You can choose any budget: one from your past work; one from another position; one that another project manager created, if you are not currently in a role in which you typically create budgets yourself; or one from a project outside of your current position. You may attach your budget at the end of this project if you choose.

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

1. For this particular project, what were the total planned costs? Describe briefly the process used to arrive at a planned cost estimate.

2. What were the actual costs? If there was a variance, what do you think caused it? Explain briefly some of the key reasons you think there was a variance between planned costs and actual costs.

3. Examine this past project budget through the lens of resource scheduling and project duration. We know that cost variance has implications for the schedule and for the project’s time to completion. Were there signals in place that indicated to you that based on cost variance, the project schedule would be affected? Describe what you observed (or, alternately, what you wish you had observed).

4. Referring to the work that was done on any completed project: go back to your project schedule and choose a date midway through the project. What was the planned value at that point in time? Alternately, if you don’t have access to the data required to answer this, describe in your own words how you would go about computing planned value for any hypothetical project midway through completion and how doing so would help improve your practice of project management.

5. Refer to any current project underway and its budget. What is the earned value as of today? Alternately, if you don’t have access to the data required to answer this, describe in your own words how you would go about computing earned value for any hypothetical project midway through completion and how doing so would help improve your practice of project management.

Part Three: Forecast Project Cost

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

Refer back to the sample project examined in module two and imagine that everything is executed perfectly. Imagine that you’re now in time period 17. Activity 4-5 is now complete as scheduled, and Activity 3-6 has also just completed, two periods ahead of schedule. Imagine that Resource A cost $6,000 for each period it was active on Activity 3-6: 5 periods, not the 7 periods at $5,000 per period expected. You are now ahead.

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Using the methods presented in this module, answer the following questions.

1. What is the cost variance?

2. What is the new forecasted total cost at completion if you use Method 1?

3. What is the new forecasted total cost at completion if you use Method 2?