Plymouth Business School
University of Plymouth

•The project environment
•Project definition
•Project objectives
•Project scope
•Specification
•Project strategy
•The importance of project milestones

• 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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

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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.

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Author
Institute
Title
Date Created
Educational Level
Keywords
John Potter
University of Plymouth
Project Management
16/06/2011
Level 5
Learning from WOeRK Work Based Learning WBL Continuous
Professional Development CPD leadership and management UKOER
LFWOER Project Management
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