Managing projects May 2015 (SIM 335)

ParkerLtdis a consultancy company specialising in the sport and physical activity sector. The organisations they are commissioned by includes: local authorities, charities, and private sector organisations. The company was founded in 2002and has shown steady growth over the past thirteen years. They trade from office accommodation (80 square metres) in a major city in England. At present the company employs 1 General Manager, 5 Lead Consultants, 3 Administration staff, and 2 Marketing Officers. As Project Manageryou areresponsible for theensuringthe initial opening and operational requirements of the new facilityare identified.You are required to prepare a reportconcerning the main issues to be addressed from a project management perspective.

ASSIGNMENT COVER SHEET UNIVERSITY OF SUNDERLAND

BA (HONS) BANKING AND FINANCE

Student ID: 149080615/1

Student Name: Tran Quyet Thang

Module Code: SIM 335

Module Name / Title: Managing Projects

Centre / College: Banking Academy of Viet Nam

Centre / College: Banking Academy of Viet Nam

Assignment Title: Individual assignment

Students Signature: (you must sign this declaring that it is all your own work and all sources

of information have been referenced)

Title page

Managing Projects

SIM 335

Banking Academy, Vietnam Submitted on 15 May, 2015 Prepared by: Quyet Thang Tran Student ID: 149080615/1

Table of Contents

Title page i

Task 1 1

Task 2 3

2.1 Concerns 3

Schedule 4

Cost – Financial Management 4

Scope 5

Quality 6

2.2 Project life cycle 7

2.3 Processes 7

2.4 Leadership 10

References 12

Appendices 15

Task 1

1) According to Larson and Gray (2011), the major characteristics of a project are as follows:

 An established objective

 A defined life span with a beginning and an end

 Usually, the involvement of several departments and professionals

 Typically, doing something that has never been done before

 Specific time, cost, and performance requirements

A project needs to have a clear objectives to make sure that all team members have the same purposes while working together Furthermore, with a specific objective, a project cannot run forever so it will end when achieving or failing its goals There are several resources such as budgets, humans to implement a project One special thing about projects is unique For example, the construction for buildings having the same designs still have the differences in locations, materials…

2) According to PMI (2008), project scope management includes the processes required to ensure that the project includes all the work required, and only the work required, to complete the project successfully Therefore, to achieve the objective that ensuring the initial opening and operational requirements of the new leisure facility, some activities such as hiring staffs, installing equipment and finding potential customers… need to be done first These tasks can

be divided into small pieces by using work breakdown structure (WBS)

Figure 1: Work Breakdown Structure for Opening a new leisure facility

3) Assume that this project starts on 05/10/2015, the full project Gantt chart will be shown as follows:

Figure 2: The project Gantt chart

Based on the Gantt above, the critical path is: A-C-F-H

Days to complete the project:

5 days + 6 days + 8 days + 3 days = 22 days

4) In this scenario, the bottom-up estimating and expert judgment can be employed for cost management By combining WBS and bottom-up estimating, the lowest level activities of work can be assigned values and then these estimates can be aggregated in accordance with the WBS tree structure to give higher level totals (Meredith & Mantel, 2009) Furthermore, Parker Ltd is a consultancy company specializing in the sport and physical activity sector for over 13 years, so the company has done many projects like this It means that the past information, documents can be as a guide for estimating the cost for this project

5) In projects, a risk can be almost any uncertain event associated with the work and project leaders must focus on risks that can materially affect project objectives or “uncertainty that matters” (Kendrick, 2015) In this scenario, the risks can be defined from the lowest level of work packages in WBS After that, the risks are analyzed based on both qualitative and quantitative measurements because risks do not give the same impacts And then, project leader has to plan specific responses for each types of risk To manage risk efficiently, project team needs to frequently hold the meeting to consider surprises for this project

6) Pinto and Mantel indicate one of three distinct aspects of project performance (outcome) as a benchmark against which to access the success or failure of a project is client satisfaction with delivered project To achieve this satisfaction, customers should be involved to this project in initial stages by using quality function deployment (QFD) QFD is a method for satisfying customers by translating their demands into design targets and quality assurance points (Akao, 2004)

There are several benefits from applying this method including:

 Customer-focused: translating customers’ input and feedback into a set of specific customer requirements

 Time-efficient: reducing time development because QFD focused on specific and clearly identified customer requirements

 Teamwork-oriented: because all actions that need to be undertaken are identified as part of the process, individuals see where they fit into the larger picture, thereby promoting teamwork even more

 Documentation-oriented: one of the products of QFD process is a comprehensive document that pulls together all pertinent data about all process and how they stack up against customer requirements This document is updated regularly

(Goetsch & Davis, 1997)

Task 2

Parker Ltd is a consultancy company specializing in the sport and physical activity sector Recently, the company conducts a special project concerned with ensuring the initial opening and identifying operational requirements of the new leisure facility This report will outline the activities required to successfully implement this new initiative, ensuring that it can open on-time, and within budget

2.1.Concerns

In the first step as a project manager, the critical factors that make a successful project implementation will be concerned According to Pinto and Slevin (1988), a project is generally considered to be successfully implemented if it:

 Comes in on-schedule (time criterion)

 Comes in on-budget (monetary criterion)

 Achieve basically all the goals originally set for it (effectiveness criterion)

 Is accepted and used by the clients for whom the project is intended (client satisfaction criterion)

This is refer to a modern model - quadruple constraints (Appendix 1): schedule, cost, scope and quality It means that if one of these factors changes, it will lead other factors to be changed A paper shows that the project manager should implement the project management methodology around the quadruple constraints as the roof for project success (Tunon, et al., 2005) Therefore, the project managers need to consider these constraints and their impacts to the completion of the projects

Schedule

Before considering project schedule, the project manager can develop a WBS The WBS will show work packages to achieve deliverable of the project However, the WBS does not illustrate time or resources for completing tasks Therefore, the critical path method (CPM) will be applied to create schedules According to CPM concepts, schedules are created by arranging activities and identifying at least one critical path (CP), by which a group of activities are connected to organize irreducible total activity duration (LIU & KUO-CHUAN, 2009) The project schedule includes the activities like job analysis, recruitment, selection; durations for each activities; precedence Furthermore, the critical path points out the shortest possible time to complete the project The individual tasks on the critical path need to be checked carefully because the tasks off the critical path have float and do not make projects delay However, this method does not identify the resources that need to get activities done

Cost – Financial Management

To manage financial factors for a project, project manager needs to estimate the costs firstly By combining bottom-up estimating method and WBS, the lowest level work packages will be calculated and then sum them up at higher levels All assumptions for estimating the costs have to

be in detail such as number of fitness equipment needed, cost of training for each employee, etc

In addition, the expert advice is also combined in order to bring out an accurate budget for this project as much as possible

In the second step, the budget for this project will be carried out A budget is defined as a

comprehensive and coordinated plan, expressed in financial terms, for the operations and resources

of an enterprise for some specific period in the future (Khan & Jain, 2007) This will provide project manager the calculations for direct and indirect costs for each task For example, hiring staffs has direct costs like recruitment announcements, qualifying staffs’ profile…and indirect costs like computer use, utilities…

Finally, project manager has to control finance by defining possible causes of variance According

to the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (2011), budgetary control (variances) is defined as the establishment of budgets relating the responsibilities of executives to the requirements of a policy, and the continuous comparison of actual with budgeted results, either to secure by individual action the objective of that policy, or to provide a basis for its revision The variances may be the change in price of equipment, the efficiency of employees, etc For example, high inflation rate can lead expenses during implementing the project to increase

Moreover, project manager can use earned value management (EVM) This method provides any project manager with early warning tool that send out a signal from as early as the 15% completion point on a project (Fleming & Koppelman, 1998) By calculating budgeted cost of working performance and actual cost of working performance through EVM, project manager can know about current status of budget For instance, if project is over budget, project manager will come

to sponsors to explain and discuss about the current situations and convince them put additional budget for completing this project

Scope

Project scope management is concerned with defining all the work of the project and only the work needed to successfully produce the project goals (Heldman, 2009) For example, in the case of opening new leisure facility, the scope includes what the project team will do such as hiring staffs, order and install equipment and attract customers Based on these activities, the requirements with criteria like specific, testability…will be listed The requirements can be defined based on survey, field reports, complaint logs, etc

When implementing this project, a lot of surprises can happened, so project manager need to prepare the solutions for these changes Firstly, the budget for this project can be reduced This leads some requirements of this project to be cut down and time for completion also increases In

this case, project manager can explain to sponsors about the significant impacts of this change and provide a reasonable explanation for all members to avoid demotivating them

In the second case, the schedule of this project can be pushed out The members may be not available for the new deadline and project manager may add more people to meet new deadline It means that the budget for this project is also changed

Another situation could be adding more budget for this project In this case, project manager can use MoSCoW method to response for this change The components of MoSCoW include:

 Must have: fundamental requirements

 Should have: a high-priority item that should be included in the solution if it is possible

 Could have: a requirement which is considered desirable but not necessary

 Won’t have: a requirement that stakeholders have agreed will not be implemented in a given release, but may be considered for the future

(IIBA, 2005) This means that project manager can add requirements in “Could have” category for this project

Quality

The quality of the project can be shown through the customer satisfaction Customer satisfaction means that a project is only successful if it satisfies the needs of intended user (Pinto & Rouhiainen, 2002) This project is opening a new leisure facility for serving the communities, therefore project manager should focus on satisfy customers who directly use the services To do this, managers can apply QFD method The QFD process involves four phases:

 Product planning: house of quality

 Product design: parts deployment

 Process planning

 Process control (quality control charts)

(Bouchereau & Rowlands, 2000)

In “House of Quality” phase, QFD uses a set of matrices to relate the voice of customer (i.e., customer requirements) to project requirements (Milosevic, 2003) For example, in this project,

muscle, etc Based on these requirements, project manager will define specific equipment for this leisure facility to meet customer needs

In the next phases, project manager can use Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle also called Deming cycle (Appendix 2) It means that all activities in the lowest level of work packages in WBS will be conducted firstly and then it will be checked with the plan in order to whether this project goes on budget and schedule If there are any changes in budget or schedule, project manager needs to response immediately to make sure the success of this project

2.2.Project life cycle

The project life cycle needs to be selected based on the features of the project because a wrong choice can lead to delay deliveries, over-schedule or over-budget For opening a new leisure facility, the waterfall approach should be applied instead of iterative project life cycle The reason

is that iterative project life cycle – there are particularly advantageous for complex projects and whenever project goals and the project scope are expected to be subject to modifications (Pica, 2015) Therefore, this type of project life cycle seem to be more suitable for software development

or IT projects While the waterfall model is a highly effective project life cycle for short-duration, well-understood projects with stable requirements and few or no dependencies (Hossenlopp & Hass, 2008) With the opening new leisure facility, there may be not too many surprises during conducting project Furthermore, the company has over 13-year experience in this area Therefore, the waterfall project life cycle can be applied

2.3.Processes

While implementing the project, there are a lot of processes that project managers have to concern

to make sure that the project will be finished successfully especially in plan phase

2.3.1 Identify stakeholders

Project managers have to understand the different needs of stakeholders Identifying stakeholders involves creating a list of all involved in the project and determining whether they are: (1) actively

or passively involved, (2) positive or negative impacted, and (3) in support of the project (Schibi, 2013) To analyze stakeholders, project manager can use different mapping techniques such as influence-interest grid, power-impact grid and Mendelow’s power-interest grid These mappings will show the positions of each type of stakeholder based on their involvement, authority and concerns in terms of planning and implementing projects