Project management

Project management

Project management is the process of planning, organizing and managing resources to successfully accomplish a given project.

A project is a temporary undertaking, having a defined beginning and end.

 

Challenges in project management

  • A primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the project constrains. These constrains are the Scope, Time and Cost (budget).
  • The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives.

Project management approaches

There are several approaches to managing project activities e.g.

  • Traditional approach
  • Critical chain approach and
  • Event chain approach

Note that for a project to be well done, careful consideration must be given to overall project objectives, timeline and Cost as well as the roles and responsibilities of all participants and stakeholders.

Traditional Approach:

In the traditional approach, 4 phases are being listed out in the dev of the project. These phases are,

  • Project initiation
  • Project planning or design stage
  • Project execution or production stage
  • Project monitoring and controlling systems
  • Project completion stage

Not all the projects will visit every stage before they reach completion

Some projects do not follow a structured planning and or monitoring stages

Some projects will go through steps 2, 3, and 4 multiple times.

Many industries and companies use this stages and approach.

Critical chain project management.

Critical chain management (CCPM) is defined as a method of planning and managing projects that puts more emphasis on resources (physical and human) needed in order to execute a project task.

It is an application to Theory of constrains (TOC) to projects.

The goal is to increase the completion rate of projects in an organization.

Applying the first 3 of the five focusing steps of TOC, the system constrains for all projects is identified as the resources.

To exploit the constraint task on the critical chain are given priority over all other activities.

Finally, projects are planned and managed to ensure that the resources are ready when the critical chain task must start, subordinating all other resources to the critical chain.

Event chain methodology (ECM)

This is the uncertainty modelling and schedule network analyzing technique that is focused on identifying and managing events and events chain that affects the projects schedule.

ECM help to mitigate the negative impact of psychological heuristics and biases, as well as to allow for easy modelling of uncertainty in project schedules.

Event chain is based on the following principles

Probabilistic moment of risk:

An activity (task) in most real-life process is not a continuous uniform process. Task are affected by external events which may occur at some point in the middle of the task.

Event chains:

Event can cause other event, which will create event chains. This event chains can significantly affect the course of the project. Quantitative analysis is used to determine a cumulative effect of these event chains on the project schedule.

Critical event or event chains:

The single events or the event or the event chains that have the most potential to affect projects are the “critical events” or “critical chains events”

Project tracking with events:

Even if a project is partially completed and data about the project duration, cost and events occurred is available, it is still possible to refine information about future potential events.

Events chain visualization:

Events and event chain can be visualized using event chain diagrams on a Gannt chart.

Project Development stages

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download our application
kawlo
sponsors Ads