Project Management

Agenda
 • Overview

 • Planning Procedures

 • Project Planning and Scheduling

 • Developing a Network Planning Diagram

 • Project Evaluation and Review Technique

 • Precedence Diagramming
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Project Management

Overview

• Uses networks for project analysis.

• Networks show how projects are organized and are used to
determine time duration for completion.
• Network techniques used are
- CPM (Critical Path Method)
- PERT (Project Evaluation and Review Technique)
• Developed during late 1950s.

Chapter 8 - Project Management 4

The Elements of Project Management
• Management is generally perceived as concerned with
planning, organizing, and control of an ongoing process or
activity.
• Project Management is concerned with control of an activity
for a relatively short period of time after which management
effort ends
• Primary elements of Project Management to be discussed:
- Project team
- Project planning
- Project control.

Chapter 8 - Project Management 5

The Elements of Project Management
The Project team
• Project team typically consists of a group of individuals from
various areas in an organization and often includes outside
consultants.
• Members of engineering staff often assigned to project work.
• Most important member of project team is the project manager.
• Project manager is often under great pressure because of
uncertainty inherent in project activities and possibility of failure.
• Project manager must be able to coordinate various skills of team
members into a single focused effort.

Chapter 8 - Project Management 6

Project Failures
 Major reasons for project runaways
 unclear objectives
 bad planning
 no project management methodology
 new technology
 insufficient staff
 All of these relate to project management
 Effective project management is key to successfully
executing a project

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Why improve PM?
 Better predictability leading to commitments that can
be met
 Lower cost through reduced rework, better resource
mgmt, better planning,..
 Improved quality through proper quality planning and
control
 Better control through change control, CM,
monitoring etc.

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Why improve PM ….
 Better visibility into project health and state leading to
timely intervention
 Better handling of risks reducing the chances of failure
 All this leads to higher customer satisfaction
 And self and organization improvement

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Project Planning
 Basic objective:
 To create a plan to meet the commitments of the project
 create a path that, if followed, will lead to a successful
project
 Planning involves
 defining the LC process to be followed, estimates,
detailed schedule, plan for quality, etc.
 Main output
 a project management plan, and
 project schedule

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 “Failing to plan is planning to fail”
by J. Hinze, Construction Planning and Scheduling

 Planning:
 “what” is going to be done, “how”, “where”, by
“whom”, and “when”
 for effective monitoring and control of complex
projects
 “Once you plan your work, you must
work your plan”
by J. Hinze, Construction Planning and Scheduling

 Planning and Scheduling occurs:

 AFTER you have decided how to do the work
 “The first idea is not always the best idea.”
 Requires discipline to “work the plan”
 The act of development useful,
 But need to monitor and track
 only then, is a schedule an effective management tool
 as-built schedules
 Project Planning: PERT/CPM
 PERT
 Program Evaluation and Review Technique
 Developed by U.S. Navy for Polaris missile project
 Developed to handle uncertain activity times
 CPM
 Critical Path Method
 Developed by Du Pont & Remington Rand
 Developed for industrial projects for which
activity times generally were known
 Today’s project management software packages have
combined the best features of both approaches.

Chapter 8 - Project Management 14

 PERT/CPM

 PERT and CPM have been used to plan,

schedule, and control a wide variety of projects:
 R&D of new products and processes
 Construction of buildings and highways
 Maintenance of large and complex
equipment
 Design and installation of new systems

Chapter 8 - Project Management 15

 PERT/CPM
 Project managers rely on PERT/CPM to help them
answer questions such as:
 What is the total time to complete the project?
 What are the scheduled start and finish dates for
each specific activity?
 Which activities are critical and must be
completed exactly as scheduled to keep the
project on schedule?
 How long can noncritical activities be delayed
before they cause an increase in the project
completion time?
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Process-based Project Execution
 Small project both engg and PM can be done
informally
 Large projects require formality
 Formality: well defined processes used for each task;
measurements used to control
 Here we focus on processes for PM only

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The Project Mgmt Process
 Has three phases - planning, monitoring and control,
and closure
 Planning is done before the main engineering life
cycle (LC) and closure after the LC
 Monitoring phase is in parallel with LC

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Key Planning Tasks
 Define suitable processes for executing the project
 Estimate effort
 Define project milestones and create a schedule
 Define quality objectives and a quality plan
 Identify risks and make plans to mitigate them
 Define measurement plan, project-tracking procedures,
training plan, team organization, etc.

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Process Planning
 Plan how the project will be executed, (ie. the process
to be followed)
 Process will decide the tasks, their ordering,
milestones
 Hence process planning is an important project
planning task
 Should plan for LC and PM processes as well as
supporting processes

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Life Cycle Process
 Various LC models - waterfall, iterative,
prototyping; diff models suit different projects
 During planning can select the model that is best
for the project
 This gives the overall process which has to be fine-
tuned to suit the project needs
 Usually done by process tailoring - changing the
process to suit the project
 Tailoring finally results in adding, deleting,
modifying some process steps

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Project Schedule
 A project Schedule is at two levels - overall schedule
and detailed schedule
 Overall schedule comprises of major milestones and
final date
 Detailed schedule is the assignment of lowest level
tasks to resources

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Overall Schedule
 Depends heavily on the effort estimate

 For an effort estimate, some flexibility exists

depending on resources assigned

 For example: a 56 PM project can be done in 8 months

(7 people) or 7 months (8 people)

 Stretching a schedule is easy; compressing is hard and

expensive
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Overall Scheduling...
 One method is to estimate schedule S (in months) as a
function of effort in PMs

 Can determine the function through analysis of past

data; the function is non linear

 COCOMO: S = 2.5 E 3.8

 Often this schedule is checked and corrected for the

specific project

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Determining Overall Schedule
from past data
Effort in person-days

400

350

300
Schedule (Days)

250

200

150

100

50

0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800

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Determining Milestones
 With effort and overall schedule decided, avg project
resources are fixed
 Manpower ramp-up in a project decides the
milestones
 Manpower ramp-up in a project follows a Putnam-
Norden-Rayleigh (PNR) curve which shows the
relationship of project effort as a function of project
delivery time.
Where
• Ea = Effort in person months
• td = The nominal delivery time for
the schedule
• ta = Actual delivery time desired
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Manpower Ramp-up
In reality manpower build-up is a step function

PTS

Design Build Test

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Milestones ...
 With manpower ramp-up and effort distribution,
milestones can be decided

 Effort distribution and schedule distribution in

phases are different

 Generally, the build has larger effort but not

correspondingly large schedule

 COCOMO specifies distr of overall sched. Design –

19%, programming – 62%, integration – 18%
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 An Example Schedule
# Task Dur. Work (p- Start End
(days) days) Date Date
2 Project Init tasks 33 24 5/4 6/23

74 Training 95 49 5/8 9/29

104 Knowledge sharing 78 20 6/2 9/30

114 Elaboration iteration I 55 55 5/15 6/23

198 Construction iteration I 9 35 7/10 7/21

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Detailed Scheduling
 To reach a milestone, many tasks have to be performed
 Lowest level tasks - those that can be done by a person
(in less than 2-3 days)
 Scheduling - decide the tasks, assign them while
preserving high-level schedule
 Is an iterative task - if cannot “fit” all tasks, must revisit
high level schedule

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Detailed Scheduling
 Detailed schedule not done completely in the start - it
evolves

 Can use MS Project for keeping it

 Detailed Schedule is the most live document for

managing the project

 Any activity to be done must get reflected in the

detailed schedule

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An example task in detail schedule
Module Act Code Task Duration Effort

History PUT Unit test # 1 day 7 hrs

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St. date End date %comp Depend. Resource

7/18 7/18 0% Nil SB

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Detail schedule
 Each task has name, date, duration, resource etc
assigned
 % done is for tracking (tools use it)
 The detailed schedule has to be consistent with
milestones
 Tasks are sub-activities of milestone level activities, so
effort should add up, total schedule should be preserved

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Team Structure
 To assign tasks in detailed schedule, need to have a
clear team structure

 Hierarchic team organization is most common

 Project manager has overall responsibility; also does
design etc.
 Has programmers and testers for executing detailed
tasks
 May have config controller, db manager, etc

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Team structure..
 An alternative – democratic teams
 Can work for small teams; leadership rotates

 Another one used for products

 A dev team led by a dev mgr, a test team led by test mgr,
and a prog. Mgmt team
 All three report to a product mgr
 Allows specialization of tasks and separate career
ladders for devs, tests, PMs

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SCM process and planning
 Have discussed Software Configuration Management
(SCM) process earlier

 During planning, the SCM activities are planned along

with who will perform them

 Have discussed planning also earlier

 Includes defining CM items, naming scheme, directory
structure, access restrictions, change control,
versioning, release procedure etc

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“Projects should be scheduled one byte at a time”
by J. Hinze, Construction Planning and Scheduling
 Creating a Computerized Schedule
 Primavera P3, SureTrak, CA-SuperProject, MSProject
 Uses CPM for calculating project duration
 Offer Gantt and Precedence views
 Gantt the default
 Activities can be viewed in other forms: activity and resource
calendars, spreadsheets
 Useful for
 updating and tracking
 sorting, filtering, resource leveling
 Creating a Computerized Schedule
 Specify a base calendar
 calendar days vs. working and non-working days
 specialized activity and resource calendars
 tasks that cannot be performed on specific days
 days that resources are available
 (otherwise assumed that resources are available at all times on
every working day)
 Specify the project start or finish date
 Creating a Computerized Schedule
 Input activities from the WBS
 basic info needed: name, duration, predecessors, and
successors
 if relevant: resources utilized plus associated costs
 Collapsing the schedule
 consolidating subtasks within their summary tasks to
view main project activities w/o cluttering the screen
Creating a Computerized Schedule
 Expanding the schedule
 showing sub tasks w/in respective summary tasks
 Link lines
 the line that connects the bars of linked tasks on the
Gantt chart
Creating a Computerized Schedule
 Linking
 creating relationships between activities
 finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, or start-to-
finish
 can include lag or lead times
 Network loop
 circular logic within a set of activities
 all loops must be eliminated for computations to be
made
Creating a Computerized Schedule
 Progress bar
 graphical representation of the % completion of an
activity at a specific date
 shown adjacent to, or within, the activity bar
 Summary task
 representing a general activity of construction
 duration calculated from sub-tasks
 Create a baseline schedule
 original schedule created at the beginning
 actual progress is compared to
Project Network
 A project network can be constructed to model the
precedence of the activities.
 The nodes of the network represent the activities.
 The arcs of the network reflect the precedence
relationships of the activities.
 A critical path for the network is a path consisting of
activities with zero slack.
Network Planning Techniques
 Program Evaluation & Review Technique (PERT):
 Developed to manage the Polaris missile project
 Many tasks pushed the boundaries of science &
engineering (tasks’ duration = probabilistic)

 Critical Path Method (CPM):

 Developed to coordinate maintenance projects in the
chemical industry
 A complex undertaking, but individual tasks are routine
(tasks’ duration = deterministic)
Order of Task Execution - Scheduling
 Network Diagrams
 Critical Path Method (CPM)
 w/in construction - most important
 Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)
 like a generalized CPM
 assumes that an activity’s duration cannot be precisely
determined
 takes most likely, optimistic, pessimistic estimates

 computes an expected duration/activity and expected

project duration
Critical Path Method (CPM)
 Identifies those chains of activities (critical paths) that
control how long a project will take.
 Two variations:
 Activity-on-Arrow (AOA)
 activities are the arrows or lines
 Activity on Node (AON)
 also known as a Precedence Diagram
 activities are nodes connected together by lines
Some CPM Terms
 Float = the amount of time an activity can be
delayed without delaying the project
 Critical = activities with no float; these activities
can not be delayed w/o extending project duration
 Contingency = include a time allowance to account
for time slippage & other delays
 Slippage = difference between actual and scheduled
progress
Project Management Plan
 The project management plan (PMP) contains outcome of
all planning activities - focuses on overall project
management
 Besides PMP, a project schedule is needed
 Reflects what activities get done in the project
 Microsoft project (MSP) can be used for this
 Based on project planning; is essential for day-to-day
management
 Does not replace PMP !

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PMP Structure - Example
 Project overview - customer, start and end date, overall
effort, overall value, main contact persons, project
milestones, development environment..
 Project planning - process and tailoring, requirements
change mgmt, effort estimation, quality goals and
plan, risk management plan, ..

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PMP Example ...
 Project tracking - data collection, analysis frequency,
escalation procedures, status reporting, customer
complaints, …
 Project team, its organization, roles and responsibility,
…

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Project Planning - Summary
 Project planning forms the foundation of project
management
 Key aspects: effort and schedule estimation, quality
planning, risk mgmt., …
 Outputs of all can be documented in a PMP, which carries
all relevant info about project
 Besides PMP, a detailed project schedule maintains tasks
to be done in the project

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