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UK Pictures US Pictures Projects User Conferences Giving
projects a brighter outlook Introduction Project Management encompasses a
vast range of skills and techniques. Successful project management
is the ability to produce the required product, on or before the
required date, at the required or minimum cost and to the specified
quality. To accomplish this you must know what you have to do, when
you have to complete interim aspects in order to complete the whole
on time and how best to do the work from a cost and quality point of
view. This takes skill and experience in: a) Setting the objectives and
creating a working structure. PLANTRAC-OUTLOOK
provides vital information to assist in successful project
management. The
Benefits The benefits of using a network
for project management can be expressed as follows: 1. A discipline, which if
followed helps identify all important actions to be taken and hence
prevents oversights. Project management is not
new Project management is not new.
Many major projects were successfully completed in the past. The Taj
Mahal, the wonderful temples in India and Thailand, the Pyramids
etc.etc. Someone was responsible for the building and completion of
these ventures and techniques must have been used. However as far as
we know there was nothing recorded on this aspect. More recent
history shows that techniques began to get formalised during the
second world war when the problems of developing new weapons and
getting them into production were highlighted. The U.S. Navy set up
an investigation code named P.E.R.T. (Programme Evaluation Research
Task) to produce a solution for the problems involved in managing
projects. The outcome of this investigation is the now familiar
technique PERT renamed Programme Evaluation and Review Technique in
which projects are planned, scheduled and controlled. Many
variations of this technique have been used since then and various
names applied such as Activity-on-Arrow, I/J, Critical Path Method,
Critical Path Analysis and Precedence. All these were based on the
same principle of having interconnecting activities.
Today many of these terms have
fallen into disuse and the term network is commonly
used to cover all these techniques. Networks of activities have been
widely used for many years now for project management purposes and
as yet it has not been surpassed by any other technique. It is used
in many different types of work from the management of the Space
programme to organising a flower show. Drawbacks There are some drawbacks if the
technique is not correctly used. Some of these are: a) Too much or too little detail
in the plan. i.e. planned at the wrong level. What is a
project? A project can be defined as
something that has a specified conclusion or end product. It may in
fact be a part of a larger project. The important fact is that it
has something delivered at the end whether it be a piece of paper, a
building, a book or a boat. A project will normally have a deadline,
a value and a quality statement of the end product. What is a
plan? All of us plan in our own way.
We plan what we have to do each morning to arrive at work on time.
Planning is common sense. We decide the tasks we need to undertake,
we estimate how long each task takes (e.g. 1 minute to brush our
teeth), we decide what we need to undertake the task (e.g.
toothpaste and brush), we work out the sequence of doing things and
so on. We have our plan and we know it. Where planning is limited to
ourselves and is routine we do not need anything formal. However
where the project is not routine and where we have to communicate
with other people and where we have to prove that we know how to do
a job and where we have to provide time scales for involvement by
other people or organisations, formal planning is essential.
A plan is a collection of all
the important activities required to be undertaken to achieve the
project objective and their dependency on each other. For example
printing the book may be an important task in publishing but it
cannot be planned to be done until the book has been written. Having
an idea as to when the printing can take place depends on when the
book is written. Writing the book itself will have many phases.
Putting all this together is the plan Why
Schedule? The plan tells us what needs to
be done. To manage a project successfully we also need to know when
these activities are to take place. We need to plan the availability
of resources, the location, the equipment, the personnel. Using the
plan in the form of a network enables us to calculate the schedule.
PLAN then
SCHEDULE Quite often one sees schedules
produced before the plan is made. Joe sits down in front of his
computer, gets a chart on his screen with dates and starts to draw
bars to denote activities under the dates. In his mind in doing this
he has taken into account that Sue is on holiday and Fred can only
deliver a computer on Friday. Joe has placed implied restrictions in
the project which no one else can see and hence not manage. i.e. no
one can easily see if there is a better way of doing something. This
may work to some extent on small projects. On larger projects it
definitely will not. The better way is to disregard all date
elements from the plan. Once the plan has been put together it can
be scheduled and the problems of meeting the schedule can then be
assessed with
alternatives. |
