Project Planning Class 7

SDLC Project Identification & Selection Project Initiation & Planning *** Analysis Logical Design Physical Design Implementation Maintenance

Class today Project Planning in more depth Define the problem Define the objectives Project Feasibility Produce the Project Schedule

Defining the Problem Concentrate on current system Provide enough information to make it specific to your application.

Define Objectives Should match to most, if not all, problems Why might objectives not cover all problems? Can be both quantitative and qualitative

Assessing Project Feasibility Economic Organizational and Cultural (or Political) Technical Schedule Resource Operational Legal/contractual

Economic feasibility Identifying the financial benefits and costs associated with the project (CBA) At this point, probably do not know enough to complete in detail. What can be done: list tangible and intangible costs and benefits.

Tangible benefits Can be measured in dollars and with certainty

Tangible Benefit Example Time spent finding invoices, receipts, and orders… Assume person spends 10% of time doing this Assume your new system will reduce the time to 1% This represents a 9% reduction in time If person’s salary is $25,000/yr, then savings is $2,250 ($25000 *.09)

Intangible benefits Difficult to assign dollar amount Customer-related, societal

Costs Tangible One-time costs Recurring costs Intangible

Other Feasibility Analyses Organizational & Cultural (Political) Technical

Other feasibility analyses Schedule Resource

Other feasibility analyses Operational Legal / Contractual

Staff the Project Covered in earlier class

Representing and Scheduling Project Plans Gantt Chart: graphical representation of a project that shows each task activity as a horizontal bar. Pert chart: A diagram that depicts project activities and their inter-relationships. Critical path scheduling: a scheduling technique where the order and duration of the sequence of activities directly affect the completion date of a project.

Steps in Project Scheduling Identify phases/activities/tasks in project(use SDLC as guide) Estimate the size of the task Determine sequence for identified tasks Schedule tasks

Class Activity A project has been defined to contain the following list of activities and tasks along with their required times for completion:

ACTIVITY/task Time (weeks) Predecessors ANALYSIS: 1 – collect requirements – analyze processes – analyze data 3 2 DESIGN: 4 – design processes – design data – design screens 1 3,4 7 – design reports 5 4,5 IMPLEMENTATION: 8 – program 4 6,7 9 – test and document – install 2 8,9

Lab Using Microsoft PM to create a project schedule (Gantt and PERT)