Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

The building blocks of a schedule start with a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS is a
hierarchical reflection of all the work in the project in terms of deliverables. In order to produce
these deliverables, work must be performed.
A typical approach in developing a WBS is to start at the highest level, with the product of the
project. For example, you are assigned as the project manager of a New Product Development
project. The new product you are developing is a new toy for children age's five trough nine. The
objective of this product development project is to increase the revenue of the organization by
ten percent.
Example of WBS:

Above is an example of a WBS for this new toy. Each level of the WBS is a level of detail
created by decomposition. Decomposition is the process of breaking down the work into smaller,

more manageable components. The elements at the lowest level of the WBS are called tasks. In
the example above, brochures, advertising and commercials are all work packages or tasks.
Marketing collateral is on a summary level called a control account in project management
parlance. In Project Insight, project management software, control accounts are called 'summary
tasks.' Summary tasks are roll ups of the tasks underneath them.
The decomposition of a schedule will continue at varying rates. 'Brochures' is a task identified at
the fourth level of decomposition, while the 'marketing plan' is also a task, but defined at the
third level of decomposition.
As a project manager, the level of decomposition will be dependent on the extent to which you
will need to manage. Project Insight supports as many levels of hierarchy as are needed. The
expectation is that each task will have a single owner and the owner is expected to manage and
report on the work necessary to deliver the task. In Project Insight, this is called the 'task owner.'
If you cannot assign a single owner, or you need to have additional visibility into the progress of
that task, additional decomposition is recommended.

Project Scheduling
Project scheduling is concerned with the techniques that can be employed to manage the
activities that need to be undertaken during the development of a project.
Scheduling is carried out in advance of the project commencing and involves:

Identifying the tasks that need to be carried out;

Estimating how long they will take;

Allocating resources (mainly personnel);

Scheduling when the tasks will occur.

Once the project is underway control needs to be exerted to ensure that the plan continues to
represent the best prediction of what will occur in the future:

Based on what occurs during the development;

Often necessitates revision of the plan.

Effective project planning will help to ensure that the systems are delivered:

Within cost;

Within the time constraint;

To a specific standard of quality.

Two project scheduling techniques will be presented, the Milestone Chart (or Gantt Chart) and
the Activity Network.
Milestone Charts
Milestones mark significant events in the life of a project, usually critical activities which must
be achieved on time to avoid delay in the project.
Milestones should be truly significant and be reasonable in terms of deadlines (avoid using
intermediate stages).
Examples include:

Installation of equipment;

Completion of phases;

File conversion;

Cutover to the new system

Gantt Charts
A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar or line chart which will commonly include the following
features:

Activities identified on the left hand side;

Time scale is drawn on the top (or bottom) of the chart;

A horizontal, open oblong or a line is drawn against each activity indicating estimated

duration;

Dependencies between activities are shown;

At a review point the oblongs are shaded to represent the actual time spent (an alternative is

to represent actual and estimated by 2 separate lines);

A vertical cursor (such as a transparent ruler) placed at the review point makes it possible to

establish activities which are behind or ahead of schedule.

Activity Networks
The foundation of the approach came from the Special Projects Office of the US Navy in 1958. It
developed a technique for evaluating the performance of large development projects, which
became known as PERT - Project Evaluation and Review Technique. Other variations of the
same approach are known as the critical path method (CPM) or critical path analysis (CPA).
The heart of any PERT chart is a network of tasks needed to complete a project, showing the
order in which the tasks need to be completed and the dependencies between them. This is
represented graphically:

EXAMPLE OF ACTIVITY NETWORK

The diagram consists of a number of circles, representing events within the development
lifecycle, such as the start or completion of a task, and lines, which represent the tasks
themselves. Each task is additionally labelled by its time duration. Thus the task between events
4 & 5 is planned to take 3 time units. The primary benefit is the identification of the critical path.
The critical path = total time for activities on this path is greater than any other path through the
network (delay in any task on the critical path leads to a delay in the project).
Tasks on the critical path therefore need to be monitored carefully.
The technique can be broken down into 3 stages:
1. Planning:

Identify tasks and estimate duration of times;

Arrange infeasible sequence;

Draw a diagram.

2. Scheduling:

Establish timetable of start and finish times.

3. Analysis:

Establish float;

Evaluate and revise as necessary

PERT
PERT, the Project Evaluation and Review Technique, is a network-based aid for planning and
scheduling the many interrelated tasks in a large and complex project. It was developed during
the design and construction of the Polaris submarine in the USA in the 1950s, which was one of

the most complex tasks ever attempted at the time. Nowadays PERT techniques are routinely
used in any large project such as software development, building construction, etc. Supporting
software such as Microsoft Project, among others, is readily available.
It may seem odd that PERT appears in a book on optimization, but it is frequently necessary to
optimize time and resource constrained systems, and the basic ideas of PERT help to organize
such an optimization.
PERT uses a network representation to capture the precedence or parallel relationships among
the tasks in the project. As an example of a precedence relationship, the frame of a house must
first be constructed before the roof can go on. On the other hand, some activities can happen in
parallel: the electrical system can be installed by one crew at the same time as the plumbing
system is installed by a second crew.

PERT
The PERT formalism has these elements and rules:
Directed arcs represent activities, each of which has a specified duration. This is the activity on
arc formalism; there is also a less-common activity on node formalism.Note that activities are
considered to be uninterruptible once started.
Nodes are Events or points in time.
The activities (arcs) leaving a node cannot begin until all of the activities (arcs) entering a are
completed. This is how precedence is shown. You can also think of the node as enforcing a
rendezvous: no-one can leave until everyone has arrived.
There is a single starting node which has only outflow arcs, and a single ending node that has
only inflow arcs.
There are no cycles in the network. If an outflow activity cannot begin until all of the inflow
activities have been completed, a cycle means that the system can never get started.

Resource management
The process of using a company's resources in the most efficient way possible. These resources
can include tangible resources such as goods and equipment, financial resources,
and labor resources such as employees. Resource management can include ideas such
as making sure one has enough physical resources for one's business, but not an overabundance
so that products won't get used, or making sure that people are assigned to tasks that will keep
them busy and not have too much downtime.

Resource management is the efficient and effective deployment and allocation of an

organization's resources when and where they are needed. Such resources may include financial
resources, inventory, human skills, production resources, or information technology. Resource
management includes planning, allocating and scheduling of resources to tasks, which typically
include manpower, machines, money and materials. Resource management has an impact on
schedules and budgets as well as resource leveling and smoothing.
In order to effectively manage resources, organizations must have data on resource demands
forecasted by time period into the future, the resource configurations that will be required to
meet those demands and the supply of resources, again forecasted into the future. Forecasts
should be as far out as is reasonable. Resource leveling, as it relates to inventory, is a resource
management technique aimed at keeping the stock of resources on hand level, reducing both
excess inventories and shortages. In project management, resource leveling is scheduling
decisions, which are driven by resource management concerns, such as limited resource
availability. As opposed to leveling, resource smoothing may not delay the project completion
date, only particular activities within their float.
Many organizations use professional services automation software tools to make resource
management tasks more efficient and effective. The automated tools may include timesheet
software and employee time tracking software, which calculate skill sets, experience and
workload in selecting the most skilled employee in an organization to handle any specific
project. This enables the organization to forecast future staffing requirements prior to project
implementation.

Corporate Resource Management Process

Large organizations usually have a defined corporate resource management process which
mainly guarantees that resources are never over-allocated across multiple projects.[4][5] Peter
Drucker wrote of the need to focus resources, abandoning a less promising initiative for every
new project taken on, as fragmentation inhibits results. [6]
Techniques
One resource management technique is resource leveling. It aims at smoothing the stock of
resources on hand, reducing both excess inventories and shortages.
The required data are: the demands for various resources, forecast by time period into the future
as far as is reasonable, as well as the resources' configurations required in those demands, and
the supply of the resources, again forecast by time period into the future as far as is reasonable.
The goal is to achieve 100% utilization but that is very unlikely, when weighted by important
metrics and subject to constraints, for example: meeting a minimum service level, but otherwise
minimizing cost.
The principle is to invest in resources as stored capabilities, then unleash the capabilities as
demanded.
A dimension of resource development is included in resource management by which investment
in resources can be retained by a smaller additional investment to develop a new capability that
is demanded, at a lower investment than disposing of the current resource and replacing it with
another that has the demanded capability.
In conservation, resource management is a set of practices pertaining to maintaining natural
systems integrity. Examples of this form of management are resource management, soil
conservation, forestry, wildlife management and water resource management. The broad term for
this type of resource management is natural resource management (NRM).

Definition of Project Controls :

Project Controls can be defined as - Management action, either preplanned to achieve the
desired result or taken as a corrective measure prompted by the monitoring process.

Project controls is mainly concerned with the metrics of the project, such as quant ities,
time, cost, and other resources; however, also project revenues and cash flow can be part
of the project metrics under control. Thus, we believe an effective Project Controls
process can be applied in a collaboration of its various sub -disciplines, such as:

1) Planning, Scheduling & Project Reporting

Scope management;

Project deliverables:

Work breakdown / Cost breakdown structures;

Schedule management;

Schedule forecasting;

Corrective action;

Progress measurement / reporting;

Productivity Analysis & Calculation;

2) Earned Value Analysis & Management

3) Cost Engineering & Estimating

Estimating;

Cost management;

Cost control;

Cost forecasting

4) Change Management & Controls

Change order control;

Trend Analysis;

5) Risk and Delay Claims

Risk Assessment & management;

Delay Claims Quantification

Forensic Schedule Analysis

Put simply, Project Controls encompass the people, processes and tools used to plan,
manage and mitigate cost and schedule issues and any risk events that may impact a
project. In other words, Project control is essentially equivalent to the project
management process stripped of its facilitating sub-processes for safety, quality,
organizational, behavioral, and communications management. Project control may be
considered the quantitative resource control subset of the project management process.

Importance of Project Controls :

The successful performance of a project depends on appropriate planning. The PMBOK

Guide defines the use of 21 processes that relate to planning out of the 39 processes for
project management, (Globerson & Zwikeal 2002). The execution of a project is based on
a robust project plan and can only be achieved through an effective schedule control
methodology. The development of a suitable Project Control system is an important part
of the project management effort (Shtub, Bard & Globerson 2005). Furthermore, it is
widely recognised that planning and monitoring plays a major role as the cause of project
failures. Despite the continuous evolution in the project management field, it appears
evident that the traditional approach still shows a lack of utilisation of Project Controls
and there have been a number of articles published to support the importance of control
in the achievement of project objectives. It has been proved time and again that Project
performance can be improved if dedicated Project Controls systems are in place. An I BC
2000 Project Control Best Practice Study carried out by IPA identified that good Project
Control practices reduce execution schedule slip by 15%. Project Controls cost range
from 0.5% to 3% of total project, (including cost accounting), therefore, to br eak even,
Project Control needs to improve cost effectiveness by around 2%. A sample study
carried out by the IBC Cost Engineering Committee (CEC) in 1999, showed cost
improvements for the projects in the study, was more than 10%. It is noted also that NP V
(Net Project Value) also benefits from schedule improvements. Success factors are based
on good Project Control practices, which result in good cost and schedule outcomes.

The project controls function is defined as:

Project controls are the data gathering, management and analytical processes used to predict,
understand and constructively influence the time and cost outcomes of a project or program;
through the communication of information in formats that assist effective management and
decision making.

RISK INVOLVED IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Clarify Ownership Issues
Some project managers think they are done once they have created a list with risks. However this
is only a starting point. The next step is to make clear who is responsible for what risk! Someone
has to feel the heat if a risk is not taken care of properly. The trick is simple: assign a risk owner
for each risk that you have found. The risk owner is the person in your team that has the
responsibility to optimise this risk for the project. The effects are really positive. At first people
usually feel uncomfortable that they are actually responsible for certain risks, but as time passes
they will act and carry out tasks to decrease threats and enhance opportunities.
Prioritise Risks
A project manager once told me "I treat all risks equally." This makes project life really simple.
However, it doesn't deliver the best results possible. Some risks have a higher impact than others.
Therefore, you better spend your time on the risks that can cause the biggest losses and gains.
Check if you have any show stoppers in your project that could derail your project. If so, these
are your number 1 priority. The other risks can be prioritized on gut feeling or, more objectively,
on a set of criteria. The criteria most project teams use is to consider the effects of a risk and the
likelihood that it will occur. Whatever prioritization measure you use, use it consistently and
focus on the big risks.
Analyze Risks

Understanding the nature of a risk is a precondition for a good response. Therefore take some
time to have a closer look at individual risks and don't jump to conclusions without knowing
what a risk is about.
Plan and Implement Risk Responses
Implementing a risk response is the activity that actually adds value to your project. You prevent
a threat occurring or minimize negative effects. Execution is key here. The other rules have
helped you to morph, prioritize and understand risks. This will help you to make a sound risk
response plan that focuses on the big wins.
Register Project Risks
This rule is about bookkeeping (however, don't stop reading). Maintaining a risk log enables you
to view progress and make sure that you won't forget a risk or two. It is also a perfect
communication tool that informs your team members and stakeholders what is going on (rule 3).
Track Risks and Associated Tasks
The risk register you have created as a result of rule 9, will help you to track risks and their
associated tasks. Tracking tasks is a day-to-day job for each project manager. Integrating risk
tasks into that daily routine is the easiest solution. Risk tasks may be carried out to identify or
analyse risks or to generate, select and implement responses.