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Review then that, projects are unique in that the result is not a routine operation but something that has not been done before. Generally a very specific scope or specification defines exactly what the result will be and is one element in deciding whether the project is a success or not. An important point to remember however, is that repeating elements does not change the fundamental uniqueness of project work. You may be given a project to plan and conduct the annual company stockholders meeting: even though this is an activity that is done every year, each time it is done is new to that team and schedule.

Temporary means it is a one time job which means they have a defined beginning and end in time. This is a second component of deciding whether the project is successful or not: i.e. did it come in on time.

This doesn’t mean that projects have to be short: many projects, especially large complex infrastructure ones, can last for years such as a new transit system or a dam. It does mean however, that the project ends when it’s objectives have been met or it becomes obvious that they will not be met. This also leads to the condition that project teams are temporary: it is almost always the case that the project team is a temporary collection of people together only for the purpose and duration of the project. This has significant people management implications to the project manager on which we will elaborate later.

The condition of projects that they are limited by cost, time, and requirements is so ubiquitous that the literature assigns it its own name to it as The Triple Constraint. Next: Limitations = Triple Constraint.

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Scope, cost / resources and the schedule are the element that define the

parameters that all project are not only constrained by but judged by at the end

of the project. Cost, time, and deliverables (or scope) are commonly called the

triple constraints which means that if one changes the other have to change.

Every project is challenged by adhering to the balance between these elements

which were set up at the beginning of the project. We will cover that in the

initiation and planning process stages of the project lifecycle.

“The Triple Constraint

The challenge of every project is to make it work and be successful within the

Triple Constraint; the Triple Constraint being quality (scope), cost (resources)

and schedule (time). These three elements of a project are known to work in

tandem with one another. Where one of these elements is restricted or

extended, the other two elements will then also need to be either

extended/increased in some way or restricted/reduced in some way. There is a

balancing of the three elements that only when fully understood by the Project

Manager, allows for the successful planning, resourcing and execution of a

project. At the end of the day, these are the key elements of a successful

project and these are the things that will determine whether or not you have

successfully managed a project.”

Give an example next slide.

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The objectives of projects and normal operations – non-projects – are

fundamentally different.

Projects: tend to finish their objectives and then terminate, they disband the

org structure and people and the focus is on something new and/or unique.

Form their own charter and unique plan.

Operations tend to be permanent’ ongoing, status quo, standard output with

‘permanent’ teams.

Operations and projects differ primarily in that operations are ongoing and

repetitive while projects are temporary and unique.

While the objective of a project is to achieve the deliverables and stop,

operations goals are to sustain and continue as long as possible. That is

operations tend to be repetitive tasks that sustain the organization. Operations

are concerned with the ongoing production of goods and / or services and is to

ensure that business operations continue efficiently. Preparing the weekly

sales report while and activity may be the usual assignment of the person

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which is repeated each week and will continue as long as the company is in business.

Yet, both projects and operations require people, resources and are constrained,

execute to plan and are controlled by other inputs.

Examples: Say the city engineering department wants to track the road maintenance

activities costs. This would not be a project rather a continuing related activities that

go on as long as the city exists. A city engineering project might be when it is decided

to build a new road somewhere and after the road is built, it stops. [Road

maintenance vs. New road construction. ]

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I mentioned earlier, the people management challenges unique to project management. It comes from the fact, that Project Managers are rarely the ‘owners’ of the resources, especially the people resources. Our discussion of project management would not be complete if we didn’t touch on this key environmental factor that impacts the projects.

What drives the environment within which you manage your project is the management structure of the performing organization.

There are three basic types of organizations from the project management perspective:

Functional : a traditional hierarchy system most people are familiar with Projects often are part of an organization larger than the project hierarchy where each employee has one clear superior – manager. This structure is by far the oldest of the organizational methods

Projectized : a structure heavily focused on conducting projects. Projectized organization is a structure that is specifically designed for executing projects: team members are often collocated and most of the organizations resources are involved in project work. The

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Project Manager has a lot of authority over his team members.

Matrix : a combination of the two. A blend of functional and projectized characteristics which attempts to combine the best features of both. The functional manager oversees the staff but the Project Manager directs them within the project. A major flaw is often employees may find themselves answering to two managers.

This is an important topic regarding how the Project Manager can manger his/her team members and next week we will go into great detail on how these structures impact projects.

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Examining these phases and how they integrate with the project knowledge areas is basically what you are going to learn in any Project Management course. In this, the foundations class, we are going to do a high level overview of the subject in which in later classes you will be doing detail studying of.

Initiating is the process of formally authorizing a new project. Initiation links the project to the ongoing work of the performing organization or satisfies the

needs of an external contracting organization. Often initiation will follow a

prior more informal process such as needs assessment, feasibility study,

preliminary plan or some element of internal assessment or externally a cost

estimate in response to a request for quote to do a project.

Planning is the process performed to establish the total scope of the effort, to define the objectives and to develop the project course of action. The management plan incorporates internal sub-plans such as schedule, risk, quality, communications and others. We will spend a considerable amount of time in the course digging into these areas in more detail because they form the backbone of your project on which everything else hangs.

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Executing – coordinating people and other resources to carry out the plan. The executing group is defined as the processes performed to complete the work defined in

the project plan. It is coordinating people and resources, managing the stakeholder

expectations during the project, integrating and performing the activities of the project

in the management plan. A large portion of the projects budget is usually expended

during the execution phase.

Monitoring and Controlling – Ensuring that the project objectives are met by monitoring and measuring progress Monitoring and Controlling is basically tracking and reviewing the progress and performance of the project. It identifies any areas in which changes are required and initiates changes as needed in response to project performance. It monitors project activities against the plan and recommends corrective or preventive action as needed. The key to this process is that activity is measured and analyzed a regular intervals and appropriate events such as design or execution status review.

Closing formalizes the acceptance of the project at its end. It verifies that the deliverables have been completed to the specifications, obtains acceptance by the

customer to formally close the project, documents any lessons learned in the project,

closes procurement activities and releases resources and team members from the

project.

These processes are linked throughout the project and within specific project phases by the outputs and inputs they exhibit; for example the planning process provides the input to the executing process and similarly, the monitoring/controlling process may provide input back to the planning / executing process to be modified to account for changing situations.

This interaction and integration is the heart of what project management is all about.

Successfully managing a project requires three things on your (and your team’s) part:

1. Having a well thought out and integrated plan

2. Knowing the mechanics of management

3. Knowing the principles of leadership

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This weeks lecture has covered a lot of ground regarding the initiation process.

The key elements of initiation are to know why is the project proposed, how

does it get accepted, and a good project charter that establishes the outline of

the project and the authority of the project manager to launch it based on the

sponsoring organizations acceptance.

The charter leads to the next stage the planning process of which the scope is

the first element. The scope will establish the foundation for our following

project management plan document, schedules, and resource commitments.

* In week four we are going to discuss the WBS: preview and week 5 details

of the stakeholder requirements.

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And that is how we eventually get to the ‘charter’ stage if our proposal is

accepted by the funding authorities.

The charter recognizes the link between the project and the organizations

ongoing strategy or business plan. The output of the initiation process is the

charter which then initiates the planning process for the project – recognizing

that the project plan is now in the hands of the project manager and the project

management team to develop and execute.

In the assignment the project introduction and business case are to be

simplified examples of these items.

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The project plan is the set of documents that summarizes the work of the

planning phase which will guide the project. It includes a number of sub plans

for example typically

Project scope and scope management plan

Schedule and with dependencies and baselines

Quality

Stakeholder management

Human Resources

Communication

Risk management

Purchasing and procurement administration

Project documentation during and at close out.

My input: the importance is to match the degree of details to the complexity /

size of the project: Right size project management:

The scope is much more than just the description of the deliverables: \

Acceptance criteria: definite and spcific, codes, standards, etc. Avoid ‘vague’

Boundaries / exclusions: Especially where some things are in danger of being

assumed

Constraints: what you can not do: roadblock. (Not a risk item)

Change management. Especially as conditions change it has been developed a

plan earlier.

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Nouns – things, events, objects, = deliverables ; not scheduled nor resources

assigned

Verbs - action, doing, (noun), = Activities; scheduled and resources assigned.

Graphic version.

These are things, not events. Deliverables .

How detailed? ‘it depends’

Never plan more than you can manage.

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Plan the work / now work the plan

Now is when we do the work

Execution requires the full complement of soft skills and hard skills :

Execution is where we make sure that the elements of the project plan are

being implemented and the deliverables are produced. For example we know

that within the scope are the requirements and in the planning phase we put

together a schedule with tasks that were to be done at certain times and with

certain resources – it is the PM’s job to make sure those events are in fact

taking place.

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Runs concurrent with the execution phase and is the source of changes to your

execution of the plan. Tells us how we are doing and where we are in the

project

EVM and other technical measures can be used to monitor progress: %

complete, etc.

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Controlling are using tools to help us implement what we need to change to

stay on track when our monitoring indicates their our plan is straying off track

or other project environmental conditions have changed.

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1. Meet with the sponsor and make sure all of the requirements of the project

as documented in the plan have been delivered to the quality level of the

standards. This is the time to get a formal and signed acceptance form

produced. Other wise, the client may feel he/she can come back for

‘extras’ before issuing final payment . If you have been keeping the

stakeholders involved and informed this should be much easier. This also

means for an external client to collect final payments for the project from

them.

2. Get feedback / lessons learned from stakeholders and project team. These

can become important baselines for future similar projects that you or your

company will conduct. What went well, what didn’t, what you would do

different, how accurate were estimates are all important pieces of

information.

3. Close out any open procurement items and arrange for any outstanding

bills to be paid in a timely manner.

4. Archive your data. Have a place that the records can be kept and available for the

next person as well as yourself.

5. Celebrate:

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As you may recall, the lowest level of the WBS was where we were comfortable with the level of detail

that we had defined all major deliverables without getting too far into details. We then looked at the

major deliverables and broke them further into specific work activity packages that support the

deliverables. Our activity list will be created based on the WBS we have compiled and this progressive

elaboration of them. The activity list will be used then to create our estimates for cost, resources, and

timeline.

An example for say building a fence project might be that the WBS deliverable items of suppliers, fence

layout , fence sections, and so forth we now take say the deliverable of fence sections and create work

packages for that task such as : dig post holes, set posts, cement the posts, and so forth.

This expansion of the tasks into work packages is what we then when estimate our resource requirements,

the order of the work, and the duration estimates to. These later will feed into the actual creating of the

project schedule.

If your WBS was very detailed, you may have already reached this level of decomposition in some areas,

which is fine. But you will probably find that you will need to create more activities as you reexamine the

WBS.

We list all these activities in an activities list which we can then begin to layout in a sequence of activities

leading up to resource assignments and scheduling.

Now also is a good time to include some milestones based on logical check points or mandated report out

gates. This is a good place to schedule major review periods in our later control and monitoring

processes.

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Now that we have our activities list, we want to sequence the activities which is nothing more

than what is the order that the work needs to be completed in.

Some tools that can help you do this are ….

The PDM is laying out graphically the relationships between the activities: this is helpful in

creating a visual picture or diagram of the activity sequencing. By visualizing the activities and

tasks graphically helps me at least and hopefully you to more easily establish the order in

which the work will be completed.

It is not necessary at this point to establish lead and lag times between the activities (Lead and

lag times are ‘when’ the next step will happen with respect to a particular activity): that will

come later when we do the actual scheduling of tasks. Assigning lead and lag is more

appropriate when we start our scheduling exercise so don’t try to guess them at this time.

When you are finished you should have created a network diagram like this one based on the

previous activities list that shows the relationship for the activities sequencing.

On board example

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There are multiple methods of estimating whether costs, resources usage, or

time. Entire careers have been build around various methods. In the interest

of time we are going to look at these basic three plus a handy method often

used as a bit of tie breaker so to speak.

Top down: early best guess in general

Parametric: Special type of top down using ratios and other historical factors

Bottom up: Detailed roll up by activities and deliverables

3 point: ‘special’ averaging method with three estimates.

One important thing to also keep in mind is that you know and adhere to any

special system your organization prefers.

Now we have some elements of our schedule in place namely: Identified all activities and tasks that are required for our project Estimates of the resources required for all activities

The time duration we thought each activity would take under ‘normal’ conditions.

Identified any date constraints that must be met

So we have the initial steps of our scheduling process done.

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The goal of the network diagram is to facilitate integrating the information we have already developed and then analyze it to establish a working schedule and timeline.

The task activities, durations , and dependency relationships in the network

are what will establish the backbone of our schedule.

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It is important to figure out what the major constraints of the project is. In

general it will be one or the other of time or resources.

A time constrained project (or task) must be completed by a definite deadline

date. Resources may be flexible but the deadline is the most pressing issue.

When confronted with this, one solution often used is to put more resources on

the tasks that may be slowing the project down.

A resource constrained project (or task) is as you might suspect is where the

PM doesn’t have enough resources available to meet the timeline.

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A way to think of project baseline is it is the agreed upon plan for the project.

Baselines are what guide the work of the project and are what are used to

measure the progress of the project.

For example the Scope baseline is the agreed upon scope statement of the

project, and the other elements that were in that document. It helps us stay

focused on the deliverables of the project and helps us prevent scope creep

during the project. If additional work is requested, then we can revise and

reissue the scope with a new baseline acknowledging the additional work and

the ADDITIONAL TIME,MONEY,QUALITY, the sponsor has agreed to

provide.

Schedule and Cost baselines are similar: schedule is the documentation at the

beginning of what our agreed to schedule is. As we do the project we then will

be able to track our performance to the baseline schedule.

The same is true of the cost: a baseline cost is established and then we track

our project performance metrics to the cost we agreed to.

MS Project has tabs and menus which will allow you to set these up and keep

them visible during the course of the project.

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Duration refers to the total elapsed time between the beginning of activity and

the completion of the activity. This is not necessarily how much time it

actually takes the person working to do the work in hours or days, but how

long is there between the beginning and the end.

Effort refers to the actual work time to complete a task. That is how may days,

hours or minutes, etc. that it actually takes to do the work.

An example is painting a wall: first primer say 8 hours – then the effort is 8

hours (1 day) and the duration ( 1 eight hour day) are the same, but then add

to duration another 1 day to dry out and then say two labor days (16 hrs.) to

finish paint ( 16 hours labor for 2 days 8 hour each duration) but then again

wait 1 day duration for final dry before the task is done. Our duration has been

1(work) + 1 (dry )+2(work) + 1 (dry) = 5 days even though the effort has only

been three 8 hour days or 24 hours.

It has been my experience that MS project can be very misleading if you are

not careful when inputting task times to specify duration or effort. Always do

a sanity check on your numbers.

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