Project Management-Chapter 9 Ideas

This Chapter taught me about balancing the trade-off among cost, schedule and quality. Good project management does deliver more for less, but there are still limits. Three most common porject constraints are time, money and resource. Three levels of balancing a porject: project, business and enterprose.
There are many ways to balance projects as there are projects:
1. reestimate the project , you will either positive, negative and best application possible impacts.
2. changing task assignments to take advantage of schedule float. it involves moving people to critical path tasks from tasks that are ont on the critical path in order to reduce the duration of the critical path.
3. add people to the project. it can either increase the numer of tasks that can be done at the same time or increase the number of people working on each task.
4. increase productivity by using experts from within the firm
5. increase productivity by using experts from outside the firm
6. outsourcing the entire project or a significant portion of it. this method carves out a portion of the project and handing it to an external firm to manage and complete. It is especially attractive if this portiion of project requires specialized skills not posessed by internal workers.
7. crashing the schedule. It can emply any of the alternatives listed in this chapter to reduce the duration of critical path tasks, but it takes the extra step of producing acost/schedule trade off table.
8. working overtime. The easiest way to add more labor to a project is not to add more people, but to increase their working hours.
Balancing at the business case level
1. reduce the product scope. it will be to reduce the functionality of the end product.
2. fixed phase scheduling. the project phases are apportioned from the top down and scheduled according to the required completion date.. At the end of each phase, the scope of the project is reevraluated to fit the remaining schedule.
3. fast tracking. it involves overlapping rasks that are traditionally done in sequence.
4. phased product delivery. Information systems composed of several subsystems.
5. do it twice- quickly and correcly
6. change the profit requirement. If your project needs to cost less in order to be competitively priced, this method recommends reducing the profit margin.
Balancing at the enterprise level
1. oursourcing allows you to purse more porjects with the same number of people
2. phased product delivery means tat more projects can be run at the same time
3. shifting work to the customer on several projects will free up enough people to purse one or two additional projects.
4. reducing product scope on several projects requires cost /benefit trade-off analysis among projects
5. using prodctivity tools can be a strategic decision to improve productivity across projects.