Chapter 10: Project Management

1. Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.

The triple constraint involves making tradeoffs between scope, time and cost for a project.  It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project. A successful project is typically on time, within budget, meets the business’ requirements, and fulfills the customer’s needs

There is a high failure rate in IT projects between 30 to 70 per cent due to late delivery, exceeding budget, or not delivering what was agreed upon

Increased Scope  = increased time +  increased cost

Tight Time = increased costs + reduced scope

Tight Budget = increased time + reduced scope.

Organisations routinely over-schedule their resources (human and otherwise), develop redundant projects and damage profitability by investing non-strategic effort that do not contribute to the organisations bottom line. Therefore, the triple constraints are important in project management as it offers a strategic framework for co-ordinating the numerous activities associated with organisational projects.

2. Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planningPERT chart (program evaluation and review technique) is a graphical model that depicts a projects task and the relationship between those tasks. A dependency is a logical relationship that exists between the project tasks, or between a project task and a milestone. PERT charts define dependency between projects tasks before those task are scheduled. The critical path is a path from the start to finish that passes through all the tasks that are critical to completing the project in the shortest amount of time.

Example of PERT chart:

Gantt chart is a simple bar chart that depicts the projects task against a calendar. In a Gantt chart, tasks are listed vertically and the projects time frame is listed horizontally. A Gantt chart works well for representing the project schedule. It also shows actually progress of tasks against the planned duration.

 Example of gantt chart:

3. Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success

Managing People - managing people is one of the hardest and most critical tasks a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers. Project managers not only need to ‘manage’ the stakeholders and the project, they need to manage the development team.

Managing Communication-while many companies develop unique project management frameworks based in familiar project management standards, or adopt specific methodologies such as PRINCE, all of them agree that communication is the key to excellent project management. It is extremely helpful is a project manager plans what and how he or she will communicate as a formal part of the project management plan. A project manager distributes timely, accurate and meaningful information regarding project objectives that involve time, scope , cost and quality, and the status of each.

Managing Change –

 Change management – a set of techniques that aid in evolution, composition, and policy management of the design and implementation of a system

Change management system – a collection of procedures to document a change request and define the steps necessary to consider the change based on the expected impact of the change

Change control board (CCB) – responsible for approving or rejecting all change requests

4. Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

Reasons why projects fail:

- Unrealistic expectations – expectations are too high therefore it is hard to aim project tasks at a hard level when

- Lack of project management – have no time, scope or costs

Reasons why projects succeed:

- Good project charter – organised, and knows where the project is heading

- Good communication- can communicate well between project team, to get the task done efficiently and effectively within the time scope and cost.