I’m back and it’s time to blog again. Today we are going to kick things off by talking about Project Management; What is it, methodologies involved and breaking down the life cycle. In this, part 1, we will be dissecting the first two phases: Project Initiation and Project Planning. Hang around for part 2, which will finalise the phases with Project execution and control, and Project closure.

So without further ado, let’s kick things off.

What is Project Management?

Put simply, project management is the discipline of planning, leading, monitoring and organizing a team and resources in order to effectively bring about the successful completion of a project based on predefined budget, time, quality, scope and resources allocated.

What is the project management life cycle?

That’s a question I get asked quite a lot when consulting with firms on project management and procedural process management alike. In theory, the project management life cycle is dependant on the industry, the methodology used by the manager and other factors – however, there are generally four stages of the project management life cycle. These include Project Initiation, Project Planning, Project execution and control, and Project closure. Let’s take a look at the first two:

1. Project Initiation

In kicking off a project,  the scope of the project is considered very important. Depending on the scenario and the work environment, a project manager is usually chosen with a number of pre-selected team members whose skills the company believes will meet the objectives required to be completed for the project to be successful. However, there are times when the project manager also has the oppurtunity to select his/her team, or just has to settle with who ever is free to be resourced at that time; (generally what happens in the Sydney Web Design and general web design industry).

It is at this stage of the game that the tools required or methodologies which are to be followed (for example PRINCE 2) are selected.

Some documents you should expect as a project manager to complete or work on include:

• Project Charter/Definition
  • This will be a document containing a statement of the scope (the total work needed to complete a project), the projects’ objectives and a listing of team members involved in the project.
• Business Plan
  • A plan of the business goals and how they are going to be acheived – whether short term or long term. I.e. drop legacy systems, etc.

2. Project Planning

The second phase of project management, the planning phase is one of the most important phases. Planning a project correctly can truly mean the difference between failure and success!

Project management planning IDE’s and applications such as Microsoft Project will help you to lay out your project in WBS format. WBS stands for Work Breakdown Structure; an important, principal project management tool which help you to structure a project in a way to define groups of work to be done.

For example, generally speaking a project working off the general SDLC (Software development life cycle) would probably be laid out in the following tree-line structure:

1. Planning
2. Analysis & Information Architecture
3. Design
4. Implementation/development
5. Support/Quality Assurance/Launch

What WBS allows you to control is everything from the subordinate costs for each task as well as materials needed and resources to allocate the work to. In essence, what you see above will obviously then be broken down into smaller, objective-based tasks; hence the ‘breakdown’.

if you are interesed in getting more acquainted the Work Breakdown Structure, head over to another article discussing the Critical Path Method of Project Management.

So there you go guys! Keep clicking around for part 2 which will talk more about project planning and the last two phases of the project management life cycle – as well as more exciting blogging coming up soon!

Don’t forget to Subscribe to our RSS feed for more content as soon as it gets posted!

Thanks for reading, C2.0

Project management is really a science. There are hundreds of things to learn and techniques to pick up. Having done Prince 2, (Projects in controlled environments), a project management methodology and accreditation started by the UK government to aid in the successful running of projects; I picked up little bits and peaces which definitely helped me in my time as project manager.

One of those things that I am now glad I can use in my day to day projects is the Critical Path Method. The Critical Path Method (CPM) is basically a tool for scheduling project activities and tasks. Essentially, its an easy method to help plot a sequence of activities for the project’s runtime.

Critical activities or the The Critical Path, as they are known, are those activities which basically determine the total project length (runtime, above) as well as make up the longest overall duration. If those activities are not completed on time, there is a major/real chance that the project will not meet its deadline(s).

For example, let’s give it a shot! consider a project, ‘Bob’s Health Foods Website design’ involving six tasks; A to F. The tasks have the following requirements, restrictions and time estimations.

Obviously, what the above mean for us in the long-run includes the following:

1. Tasks/activities A and B have no predecessors. What that means is that they don’t have to wait for any other task to start and/or finish before they themselves can start. That’s good news! It means we can get going on A and B right away
2. Activity C however is a little bit of a brain teaser. This activity cannot begin until activities A and B are completed.
3. Activities D, E and F also have predecessors but only one per activity.

Okay, let’s find the critical path, shall we?

[click to maximize]

As we can see from the cool Critical Path diagram above, it all starts to make a little more sense! Our project should technically not be finished before 13 days if everything goes to plan. We calculated this by plotting the activities along a time line based on days and compared the activities in terms of any predecessors.

If an activity had a predecessor, obviously It would not be able to begin until the predecessor has run its course. This is why E, in the diagram comes right after A – because our rules stated that E cannot start until A, E’s predecessor has occurred/been completed.

Just briefly, activities such as C can be classed as having “total float”, or in layman’s terms; having the ability to be delayed without affecting the overall time line of the project. As can be seen from the critical path diagram, the path from activity C to activity F has leeway of one day! What this essentially means is that if C ran over by one day, the project would not be delayed because of the extra day between the two activities.

Having said that – if anything is delayed on the critical path; i.e. activities A and/or E, you would probably want to call it catastrophic failure (depending on the size of the project) – because it means you have just pushed your deadline! [I.e. watch out!]

Hopefully this process sinks in for you a bit more than before now. Modern project management tools like Microsoft Project can automatically work out the critical path for you – thus isolating those tasks that have to be completed on time to meet a project’s deadline. However, I must admit, it’s always a little more fun doing it yourself; especially if it’s a fairly small project!

So there you go guys, my first project management in detail article. Hopefully you are a little bit more across how the Critical Path analysis/diagram works now and how it can aid you in your next project.

Obviously the critical path is also good at helping to estimate how long a project will take in terms of dates. You’d never just tally up the individual ‘time to complete’ rows! For example, based on our project in this case, we have 6+4+5+8+7+5 = 35! Obviously our project isn’t going to take that long! Good project management, and more importantly better project planning taking into consideration Critical Path analysis will definitely aid you in getting it right!

Hope this has helped! Drop me a comment if you have any further questions, or subscribe to the RSS feed for more posts! Till next time, Cheb.

Tags: Critical Path, PRINCE, Project Management, web development
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