John Potter Plymouth Business School University of Plymouth Project Management

The project environment Project definition Project objectives Project scope Specification Project strategy The importance of project milestones Back to basics

The project planning is a key part of the process It determines cost and duration, level of resources and duration of the project, the allocation of work and resources, the ability to monitor progress and assess the impact of changes The process may be shown as five stages: Identify activities Estimate times and resources Identify relationships and dependencies Identify schedule restraints Create the schedule Effective project working is more about the human aspects than the technical aspects as computer software can today handle most of the planning activity Project planning

 Monitoring tools which are appropriate to the particular project  Maintaining commitment of all stakeholders  Discussion, planning, doing and reviewing cycles as a continuous process  Using targets and milestones effectively  Achievement graphs  Creating a high performing team  The superteam charter

 Obsessive in the pursuit of success  High expectations of ourselves and others  Demonstrating respect for all stakeholders  Giving early warning of possible problems  Working hard to keep each other up to date with progress  Moving from blame frame to outcome frame when things go wrong  Representing the project and its team positively both inside and outside the organisation  Valuing, involving and being open with invisible team members  Understanding how our own roles fit in with others  Being open when performance does not match aspiration and ensuring that we take the appropriate action to get things back on track

 A complex process  Identifying all tasks and estimates  Being aware of restrictions on start and completion dates  Identifying parallel activity  Identifying the critical path  Taking into account resource issues

 This identifies the shortest time for project completion  An excellent example is shown on page 84 of project leadership by Briner, Geddes and Hastings.  This network diagram shows the key issues of events numbers, earliest start and latest finish times  The critical path is clearly defined  Another excellent description with examples of critical path method is shown in ‘Operations Management’ by Slack, Chambers and Johnson pages 536 to 539 and includes a section on calculating float, which relates to the ability to change the timings of activities in various parts of the project to accommodate resource and other issues.

 Many types of estimate - ball park, worst case, best case etc  PERT gave us a mathematical approach which gives optimistic, a most likely and a pessimistic estimate  Using basic statistics one approach to estimates is based on the formula t e = t 0 + 4t l +t p 6 Where t e is the expected time, t l is the most likely time Where t 0 is the optimistic time, t p is the pessimistic time Page 542 of ‘Operations Management’ shows how this beta probability distribution can be developed into comprehensive analysis of means and variances throughout a network

 Project leader is not an accountant  Awareness of financial issues is very useful  Capital  PFI (Private Finance Initiative)  Cashflow  Monitoring

 A benefit of network analysis is the identification of resource constraints  Rescheduling may reduce the pressure on resources simply by rescheduling some activities  Operations Management gives some useful and clear examples  In particular the process of ‘crashing networks’ is discussed which a process of reducing time spans on critical path activities so that the project is completed in less than the planned time. (See Operations Management Page 545). ‘Operations Management’ by Nigel Slack, Stuart Chambers and Robert Johnson (2001) Prentice Hall

Slack. N., Chambers. S. & Johnson, Right. (2001) Operations Management. Prentice Hall Briner. W., Geddes. M. & Hastings.C. (1990) Project Leadership. Gower: Aldershot, England. Project Management Institute (2009) A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: PMBOK Guide. Pretorius. F., Lejot. P., McInnnis. A., Arner. D. & Hsu, B.F.C (2008) Project Finance for Construction and Infrastructure: Principles and Case Studies. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford. References

This resource was created by the University of Plymouth, Learning from WOeRk project. This project is funded by HEFCE as part of the HEA/JISC OER release programme.Learning from WOeRk This resource is licensed under the terms of the Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license ( The resource, where specified below, contains other 3 rd party materials under their own licenses. The licenses and attributions are outlined below: 1.The name of the University of Plymouth and its logos are unregistered trade marks of the University. The University reserves all rights to these items beyond their inclusion in these CC resources. 2.The JISC logo, the and the logo of the Higher Education Academy are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution -non-commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK England & Wales license. All reproductions must comply with the terms of that license. Author John Potter InstituteUniversity of Plymouth Title Project Management Date Created 16/06/2011 Educational Level Level 5 Keywords Learning from WOeRK Work Based Learning WBL Continuous Professional Development CPD leadership and management UKOER LFWOER Project Management Back page originally developed by the OER phase 1 C-Change project ©University of Plymouth, 2010, some rights reserved Text for audio