This is just 1 of my assignment that I had done in my final year first semester for Project Management. This is group assignment that formed by 6 team members, and I do for the phase 3 -Executing or Controlling. We get full mark in this assignment, thank you for all team members, and I feel that the knowledge here is quite useful for future especially for those who had planned to engage in field of engineering management like me… Just post it here so that I won’t loss it :) ………
INTRODUCTION
Over the years, those involved in managing projects have observed that projects have special characteristics that can be exploited to manage them more effectively. One of those areas somewhat peculiar to the project environment deals with project phases.
Projects should be structured to take advantage of the natural phases that occur as work progresses. The phases should be defined in terms of schedule and also in terms of specific accomplishments. You should define how you will know when you are finished each phase and what you will have to show for it.
The Project Management Institute defines four major project phases: initiation, planning, execution and closure. One could make the case that almost every project goes through these four phases. Within these phases are smaller gradations. Some methodologies suggest decomposing projects into phases, stages, activities, tasks and steps. However, we will only discuss the four major phases for the project in Fund Services in XYZ Investment Company.
ACTIVITY 1
PHASE 1: PROJECT INITIATION
The launching of a project must have its reasons and purposes. The purpose of the initiation phase is to assess each particular investment against all others which Brookes might make and be clear about what it entails and the value for money which it will deliver. The early phases will shape the direction for all further efforts on the project. They provide requirements definitions, evaluation of alternative approaches, and other requires information to the project.
Project initiation should give a clear indication of the deliverables, outcomes and benefits of the project and at a high level, the funding and resources required to deliver them with budget and key milestones outlined. At the end of the initiation phase, the project ‘mission’ should be framed, establishing:
• the purpose, problem or opportunity which the project is addressing
• the objective
• the critical success factors, deliverables, outcomes, benefits and risks, and the relationship between these elements
For Fund Services Business Unit, they noticed that they have to face a greater competition from the current market. As a result of federal legislation repealing provisions of Glass-Steagall Act, nowadays the banks may perform securities-distribution services themselves and thereby have become potential new competitors in the proprietary fund-services market. Besides that, the consolidations in the banking industry have reduced the total number of customers in the market. These have become external threats to the business of Fund Service Business Unit. The lack of cost information by activity and customer also inhibiting Fund Service from identifying cost-reduction opportunities to mitigate continuing margins pressures. This is the internal threat faced by the business unit.
These threats have made Carl Haines, the chairman of the board & Chief Officer of XYZ Investment Company to launch a project to cope with it. As the external threats are not under the company’s capability to solve it, thus the project launched for sure has objectives of solving the internal threat, which is setup a tool that can collect the information of how the money is spent and where it has spent to, and therefore can manage the property of the company in better way.
After brainstormed with his senior accountant, Terry Smith, Carl decided to use Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system as the tool to achieve the objective stated. Terry will be the project manager for this project since he has some experience in using the tool and he was just come back from a Strategic Cost Management Conference. The key tasks that identified by Terry to implement ABC system are:
• Define model structure
• Identify model cost drivers
• Define users and security requirements
• Create report specifications
• Access cost driver data availability
• Design interface specifications
• Prepare final design document
• Build interfaces
• Setup model in ABC software
• Collect and load resource and driver data
• Conduct test run of model
• Review and validate model results
• Prepare materials and present findings
After identify the drivers and objectives of the project, next we have to identify the stakeholders of the project. A stakeholder is anyone with a valid interest in your project. If your project affects someone else's work, they're a stakeholder. Some stakeholders will have direct input into your project - some will even have signoff - while others will simply have a representative of their interests (a UCD specialist will represent the users for example). Projects are hard when stakeholders have different agendas, goals and priorities. As well as managing the project, a big part of a Project Manager's job is keeping the stakeholders aligned with each other and with the project team. Anything you can do to help will be appreciated. Hence, we can see that stakeholders play an important role in determining the successfulness of a project.
For the project run in Fund Service Business Unit, the only stakeholder identified by project manager, Terry, is Carl. As the project was issued out by Carl and he was the Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer, thus as long as Carl is happy with the outcome of the project, then everything should be fine.
PHASE 2: PLANNING
Estimation on task duration is a critical issue in project planning. In this case, the planning involve assignment of resources form different department, Terry which is not much expose to other field carried out a meeting with experience executive to obtain advice, determine following task and estimate the time require to finish the task. He first set up a meeting with Barbara Gibbons to get her perspective and buy in on the project. In the meeting with Barbara, the task duration and precedence relationship of the tasks in model structure, identify the model cost driver, defining the user and security requirements and create the report specification is determined. Follow by having a meeting with head of technology for FS, Paul Desmond, to discuss the information technology elements of the plan. The task duration and precedence relationship discussed above include the assessment of cost driver data availability, design interface, final design document interface building setup model in ABC software task. Following task which is collecting and loading resource and driver data, conduct test run of the model and reviewing and test run of the model is define by Terry and the task duration and precedent activity is estimate by Terry himself. Next step is generating the resource requirement and get approval from other head of department. After the following steps Terry have to come out with the detailed project plan and project team orientation materials. Thus the component of the project plan such as project work breakdown structure (WBS), project milestone and deliverables, project schedule, project resource, project risk and project budget have to be identify firstly.
In the work breakdown structure, Terry had to break down the task into more detail component to improve the accuracy in estimating the duration of the task. On the other hand, In order to identify the individual tasks in a project it is useful to create a Work Breakdown Structure. The purpose of a WBS is to decompose the project into steps and sub-steps. Thus the WBS is the foundation for the detailed project plan. Steps to generate the WBS include firstly, gather the team together and brainstorm all of the tasks and sub-tasks in the project, next are to write them down and gather different activity written by each project team members with thought of as many tasks as they can. Follow by arrange the task generated into groups under the major areas of activity. Lastly, add, modify, remove and shuffle the sticky notes until the WBS is accurate, complete and logical.
The project schedule is a calendar that links the tasks to be done with the resources that will do them. Before a project schedule can be created, the Terry must have a work breakdown structure (WBS), an effort estimate for each task, and a resource list with availability for each resource. If these are not yet available, it may be possible to create something that looks like a schedule, but it will essentially be a work of fiction. A project manager’s time is better spent on working with the team to create a WBS and estimates than on trying to build a project schedule without them. The reason for this is that a schedule itself is an estimate, each date in the schedule is estimated, and if those dates do not have the buy-in of the people who are going to do the work, the schedule will almost certainly be inaccurate. Thus Terry as a project manager is responsible in coordinating the workers from different department to work as a team.
For each task, it may require one or more resources allocated and depends on the complexity and duration of the task.. To do this, Terry must first assign the task to people who will perform it. For each task, Terry must identify one or more people on the resource list capable of doing that task and assign it to them. Once a task is assigned, the team member who is performing it is not available for other tasks until the assigned task is completed. While some tasks can be assigned to any team member, most can be performed only by certain people. If those people are not available, the task must wait.
Risk management is an important part of project management. Although often overlooked, it is important to identify as many risks to your project as possible and be prepared if something bad happens. Examples of common project risks include time and cost estimates too optimistic, customer review and feedback cycle too slow, unexpected budget cuts, unclear roles and responsibilities, stakeholders changing requirements after the project has started, stakeholders adding new requirements after the project has started, poor communication resulting in misunderstandings, quality problems and rework and lack of resource commitment. Thus Terry has to identified to the risk, prepare the solution for the risk identified and if possible prevent the risk from occurring.
Hourly rates for development time, escalation costs for rapid development, and pricing of tools and other resources can fluctuate based on little more than what the client can afford. For the Terry the project manager of the ABC, project budget can be consider as a baseline used to determine whether the project is on track It is important to ensure an accurate projection of the amount of money required to deliver a solution. Thus the project budget has to estimate by considering to the cost need and risk. Types of cost in project include; resource rates, the cost of a work resource based on the amount of time that the resource spends working on the project. Rate-based material costs are the costs of consumable material resources, such as building materials or supplies, to which have assigned standard rates. Fixed costs is the total cost that represents the price for doing a task or project, regardless of the number of resources assigned, the number of hours worked, or the amount of materials used. Per-use costs are the single amount that it costs each time you use a resource.
By referring to the project work breakdown structure, project milestone and deliverables, project schedule, project resource, project risks and project budget, Terry is able to develop the detailed project plan and project team orientation material to assist further planning of the project.
PHASE 3: EXECUTING OR CONTROLLING
In the phase of Executing or Controlling, it is crucial to makes sure all the plans are done properly and it follows the milestones that had been estimated in the previous stage. People and other resources need to coordinate nicely to ensure that project objectives are met. In short, activities that we need to do in this stage included executing, monitoring the project plan, controlling changes, reporting project performance, modifying the project plan and obtaining acceptance for plan modifications.
In this case, executive should always follow up the status, measure the ongoing various project activities in the real time. By the information that obtaining from measuring progress, we are able to compare the actual with planned performance. A gap analysis can be used as a basis for testing the project status. Smaller gaps between the planned and actual performance indicates that the better the outcome. Once we detect a significant deviation from the project plan, it becomes necessary for us to engage in some corrective action to minimize or remove the deviation.
In this project example, they are facing some problems in their project during their executing phase. These problems included unexpected change in scope, inability to get a decision and staffing issues.
Unexpected change in scope is the problem that will be faced in most of the project executing phase. In this example, Carl had decided to include Fund Operations in the project’s scope. This had made up some changes in the project execution and a resources re-allocation need to be done due to ripple effect. The main issue of consideration is “How Do You Get Rid of Blind Spots on Your Project” in the prior stage of project planning. The globalization is forcing our world, how everything started, to what it caused and how we should act in order to succeed. One of the things we took from it, is that in our world you should always be aware to the changes in the environment (no matter what), adjust ourselves and not fight it. Good preparation will improve our reactions during unexpected changes. Risk mitigation activities should do it. By identifying potential risks, preparing the mitigation plan and so on, we can be ready for it, but it’s still a change.
For inability to get a decision, in this project example is stated that Terry just decided on his own judgment to pursue 2 alternatives simultaneously in Call Center Department due to emergency in making a important decision to correct the bias in the initial plan. Terry is forced to do so because of the top management hope to have more meetings and discussion before changes had been made, but the timing is seem as a critical factor for Terry to make the change. It is difficult to confirm whether our managers and employees are aligned to the organization's goals and are committed to their urgency. Executives communicate company goals, speak to them often and even write them in newsletters. Unfortunately, there is little or no testing done to ensure the goals are understood and employees are committed to them. As executives communicate goals to the front line, major distortions occur in the goals' urgency and importance. This leads to front line workers seeing conflicts in what they are asked to do and whether their work relates to corporate goals at all.
• How do executives communicate in a brain-friendly way that also tests for buy-in?
• How does a company create an open dialogue as to the best way of taking actions to meet the organization's priorities?
These 2 questions need to solve in proper way in order to eliminate the problem of inability to get a decision in project executing phase.
The last problem facing by the department is staffing issue. Staffing includes practice from recruiting, selecting, and establishing workforces for a project, and even firing them when they are no longer needed. Project management staffing solutions must incorporate proper inside thinking to produce strong firm results. Human resource management is the process of managing people of the project with the human approach, which means employing and deploying people, developing and utilizing their skills, maintaining and compensating their deliveries, and directing their forces towards a project goal. In this project example states that even Terry had given another individual to assist him for one day a week, but he having difficulty making this resource productively. This may be cause by the individual assigned is not met the requirement of the following position. Furthermore, the staff is only assign to Terry once a week and this mean that the staff is not really clear about the overall flow of the project and even the ultimate goal. This raise up a lot communication problem and the time is wasting just for the staff to follows up the thing before he/she get familiar with the task assigned. In a project, the human workforce remains the nucleus energy, thrusting the project brim to the maximum extent for object fulfilment. So we can conclude that human resources department plays the important role in human power allocation and this is the important factor for leading the project to the journey of success.
PHASE 4: CLOSING
As we can see, now the Call Center model had identified 15 unique cost-reduction opportunities and one opportunity for additional revenue generation. And all this achievements obviously supported the organization’s revised competitive situation. Now, the project team was mobilizing to create the Fund Operations ABC model that Carl had requested late into the FS pilot application. It is in the way toward move the Call Center model from a pilot to a mainstream mode, which could be used by the business on a regular basis. So we can conclude that the project is very successful.
Through the project, there are many things that can be learned along the way to completing the tasks. It is impossible to achieve 100% successful in the project. Mistakes can be happen in the project initiation, project planning and executing/ controlling. After a mistake is identified, it is important to adjust it immediately. By adjusting the project, the initial plan has to be changed to suit the latest developments. Therefore, it is very important to learn from mistakes. The first point is to consider the internal factors that might affect the project. The project planning must be produced only when we have done a good study on the whole project concept. It is not use to only make management team happy, but more important issue is to look through every detail in project. The second point is to ensure the consistency and continuity of the project between phases in different stages. Although we understand that the project will not be done 100% ideally, but what we can do is to minimize the deviation of the project during executing and implementation. In ABC project, the planning is merely done by Terry Smith and Carl Haines, during implementation, the deviation from what they planning is very obvious and the things had not turned out quite the way they planned. Problems like unexpected change in scope, inability to get a decision, and staffing issues emerge gradually during implementation. The most important is how they adjust the project until it fulfils the initial objective of the project.
Typically, after finishing the project, the team members are either sent back to their initial departments or moves on to the new project. In this case, the team is assigned with a new project which is the continuous of the previous project. In this new project, Terry was responsible for updating the Call Center model via manually survey with call volume data by customers. After finishing the task, the project is consider finish and thus the team members are sent back to their initial position. Therefore, Terry will return to his position as Senior Accountant.
ACTIVITY 2
The plan developed was not adequate in addressing all of the issues of the project scope. However, there is no sufficient information for us to generate new or alternate project plans because of insufficient information.
The things that can be improved in the project plan are:
1. Project Budget
a. The information about the amount of resources (money) used in using these individuals for the project instead of using them in their default jobs.
b. The information (their wages) were not provided at all
c. Good project planning would have included the project budget.
2. Work Breakdown Structure
a. Only the main tasks were identified and allocated to resources. However, there is no further work breakdown structure to suggest what subtasks that goes to which resources.
b. The main concern is that there is no proper allocation and description about what work will be done under each main tasks.
c. If only one resource is supposed to handle it then it is fine but problems and complications arise especially when there are 2 or more individuals involved.
3. Project risks
a. There is no risks identified at all and also there is no contingency plan to minimize the damage taken should there be any complications during the project.
b. Neither is there any information regarding a way to handle crisis or risks for the project.
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