Thursday, April 13, 2006

Project Management - CH.4 Summary

Performing, or doing, the project -- implementing the proposed solution -- is the third phase of the project lifecycle. This phase starts after a contract or agreement is drawn up between the customer and the contractor or project team, and ends with the project objective is accomplished and the customer satisfied that the work has been completed in a quality manner, within budget, and on time.

This third phase has two parts: doing the detailed planning for the project and then implementing that plan to accomplish the project objective. It is necessary to develop a plan that shows how the project tasks will be accomplished within budget and on schedule. Planning determines what needs to be done, who will do it, how long will it take, and how much it will cost. The result of the planning effort is a baseline plan for performing the project. It is important that the people who will be involved in performing the project also participate in planning the work. Participation builds commitment. Once the plan has been established, the project team, led by the Project manager, implements the plan.

Risk management involves identifying, assessing, and responding to project risks in order to minimize the likelihood and impact of the consequences of adverse events on the achievement of the project objective. Risk identification includes determining which risks may adversely affect the project objective and what the consequences of each risk might be if they occur. Assessing each risk involves determining the likelihood that the risk of that will occur in the degree of impact the event will have on the project objective. Risk response planning involves developing an action plan to reduce the impact or likelihood of each risk, establishing a trigger point for when to implement the actions to address each risk, and assigning responsibility to specific individuals for implementing each response plan. During the project, it is important to a value wait all risks to determine if there are any changes to the likelihood of occurrence or the potential impact of any of the risks; also, new risks may be identified that were not considered as a risk earlier in the project.

While the project work is being performed by the project team, it is necessary to monitor progress to ensure that everything is going according to plan. The project control process involves regularly gathering data on project performance, comparing actual performance to plant performance, and taking corrective actions if actual performance is behind plain performance. Project management is a proactive approach to controlling a project, to insure that the project objective is achieved even when things don't go according to plan.

The fourth and final phase of the project lifecycle is terminating the project. It starts after the project work has been completed. If her press of this phase is to learn from the experience gained on the project in order to improve performance on future projects. Post Project evaluation activities include both individual meetings with team members and a group meeting with the project team. It is also important to meet with the customer to access the level of customer satisfaction and determine whether the project provided the customer with the anticipated benefits. Projects may be terminated before completion for various reasons. They may be terminated by the customer because of dissatisfaction. This can result in a financial loss and tarnish the reputation of the contractor organization performing the project. One way to avoid early termination due to customer dissatisfaction is to monitor the level of customer satisfaction continually throughout the project and take corrective action at the first hit of any dissatisfaction.


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