Assignment 3

Assessment 3 Context

Project Monitoring and Control

Throughout its life, a project should be continuously monitored and carefully controlled. The health of the project—from initiation and planning, through execution, to closure—is maintained by careful observation and steady direction.

To effectively monitor the project, you must collect information about it as it develops, measure its progress, and disseminate your findings to stakeholders. You will use the current version of the project management plan and updated project performance information to assess and evaluate progress.

To effectively control the project, you will recommend the following to stakeholders:

· Corrective actions.

· Preventative actions.

· Defect repairs.

· Change requests.

Assessment 3 will focus in part on the project management processes of monitoring and controlling, with special attention to Gantt charts and global business relationships.

Gantt Charts

Gantt chart is an important tool used to monitor and control a project. This tool, named after its developer, Henry Gantt, displays scheduling information. On the chart, project activities are listed down on the left side, and dates appear across the top. The duration of an activity is thus displayed as a date-placed horizontal bar, against X-axis and Y-axis. In this assessment, you will compose a Gantt chart to plan project management activities.

Global Business Relationships

Today, a large project can affect business units from around the world. Global business relationships permit many projects to cross continental and cultural boundaries. It is common for a project in the United States to include the input of offshore resources. Effective communication among all of the shareholders involved in the project can thus be challenging. Careful monitoring and control of such a project will enable you to provide shareholders with the information they require.

Work Breakdown Structure

Once the project scope has been identified, you are ready to break the project work into manageable tasks, or deliverables. The work breakdown structure (WBS) identifies the tasks and subtasks required to produce the identified deliverables. Information from the scope statement, scope management plan, and approved change requests are entered into the WBS template. The output of the WBS process includes the WBS, scope management plan updates, and a dictionary of any new terms introduced by the WBS process.

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