Project Management

Society Business and Career
1

Hello all,

Does anyone work in project management? I require some advice on how to plan a project.

Thanks

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Re: Project Management

shoot the question.. i will try my best to answer you..

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Re: Project Management

I have to produce a PID using Prince2 framework, (as part of an assignment) and my question is (so far, ive only just started) what does/are project tolerances?

thanks

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Re: Project Management

Well in brief, the project tolerance is used as an indicator of the variation in duration, to which your project may be exposed. It is also sometimes referred to as the project buffer. In my project management lectures, I refer to the same concept as a stochastic/probabilistic estimate of project completion.

The idea, at a bare minimum, is to determine the critical path in your project, and estimate its variance to allow you to make an informed judgement about various milestones. That being said, corporate projects almost always include multiple parallel sequences of activities, and you somehow need to also be able to explore how variation along those parallel structures interact.

If you need more help with this, I can post a copy of my lecture notes here. There are pretty basic formulae for calculating tolerances and probabilities of completion.

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Re: Project Management

Umar, thanks for the explanation your lecture notes would help. I should have really stayed awake during the lectures I attended on this, but the lecturer was boring to listen to:crying:

post pics of ur pretty hands
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Re: Project Management

Umar post your lecture that would be very interesting reading. In addition if you have something more on the topics of program mgmt, or project protfolio mgmt that would be great.

sadly much of the project mgmt literature deals with I/T proj mgmt and then some with engineering PM.

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Re: Project Management

Yes Umar. Please post the notes.

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Re: Project Management

Well… I teach Project Management as part of two separate courses in Operations Management, and Information Systems Management.

The treatise in IS Management is more specific to systems development frameworks and Six Sigma for IS Projects.

I’m posting the notes from my Operations Management course. This includes the information that Sairab is looking for in terms of Project Tolerances. Also included are topics like project crashing using heuristics and linear programming.

I’m posting the PDF versions of the powerpoint slides and excel files. If someone needs the originals, I can email them individually.

Edit: The Main PDF was too big to post as an attachment. The files are now uploaded to my website. These can be accessed from:

Hope this helps.
Ciao.

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Re: Project Management

Umar this is still limited, thats a fundamental rpoblem and limitation in majority of project mgmt cxourses, certificates and what nots, they are very systems focused and then secondly operations focused. That is not all where project mgmt expertise is needed. From 2003 t0 2005 I was involved in various service launches, one of this was a global program which had aspects that included subcontracting, strategic planning, fuinancing, strategic alliances, product development, marketing, competitive intelligence, sales, hiring, training, you name it. It was done as a project/program of a new product launch, and majority of what was covered is not seen in the overwhelming majority of project mgmt courses. Even PMI acknowledges the limitations of the PMP title and how it is focused on general aspects. The majority of courses do an extreme disservice to non techie or non operations people by not alighing their real world situations with the discipline.

I have been involved in project based approaches for over a decade and continue to be baffled at the little attention paid to this by academia as well as certification bodies.

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Re: Project Management

^ I agree with you - that's how the treatise tends to be in the majority of the courses that I've seen. I do however teach an Intro to Management Consulting course where the discourse is more high level and concentrates more on the strategic context of projects, general stakeholder management and global and virtual project management. The course is based on case studies and guest lectures, and the core takeaway is far more improvisational rather than the type of project management techniques that I teach in the other two courses mentioned above.

I only posted part of the lecture slidesets that were relevant to the original question.

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Re: Project Management

i unbderstand, my rants were not an attack on you by any means but just what i see as a major void in project mgmt education.

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Re: Project Management

When it comes to project management, I think academia and real world are on opposite sides of the spectrum. Project management is more of an estimation of tasks, budgets and resources to the best of project manager’s knowledge & experience. It evolves all the time with new and unseen variables, hence the term tolerance or buffer. You can only be as good as your experience, not the methodology that you follow.

PMP guidelines are only as good as the word guidelines. Following the guidelines and trying to apply them in real life situations, tracking the project and coming up with formulas for the shortest path is time consuming, inefficient and a project in itself. The management softwares out there are no help either. I’m not saying we should ignore the methodologies but they should not be followed at the expense of the project itself. I’d take an experienced project manager over an educated one any day.

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Re: Project Management

^ and I’m certain that almost anyone who’s managed at least one real world project will agree with you Fayz.

In my own experience, the methodologies and frameworks are very helpful in the early stages when you need to estimate the timelines, budgets, and personnel resources. It’s pretty much after your presentation to the C-level execs, that you tend to start improvising and realize that that you’re not going to be able to follow the your terms of reference and initial plan.

That being said, the formalism does help in aligning team accountabilities, and provides a frame of reference to your own team as well as external observers.

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Re: Project Management

on a different note, what do you think of agile methods like Scrumm?

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Re: Project Management

Fayz is absolutely right. I’d take an experienced PM that may not follow every little detail taught in the certification course over a recent grad any day of the week.

But Umar makes a valid point that without structure, accountabilities are ignored and the whole project and team suffer.

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Re: Project Management

The general framework of project mgmt is imprtant, rangign from agreement on scope, resource loading and looking at the critical path.

Otherwise things can go to hell in a handbasket very quickly.

For the project that I mentioned of this new product launch, the nick names the company gave to myself and my boss were Darth vader and Darth Sidious/Emperor. My sole task was to get things done based on the strategic direction we decided with the EVP.

without having the structure and the toolset I would not have been as effective as I was. all tools have their limitations whether its project, team manager, primavera or clarity. a good Pm can be limited by the tool but vercome it, but more often its the tool that is limited by an ineffective PM.