Assignment 1 Identify elements of concern (e.g. resources.docx

Assignment 1:
Identify elements of concern (e.g. resources, time, cost, quality,
scope, accessibility to interviewees,
generation a questionnaire, distributing the questionnaire,
sample size, ability to analyze/verify the
results…) of your project and suggest what you intend to do
about them.
PS: My Project about: Relationship between Money and Time
with Virtualization Technology.
Minimum number of words 500, referencing with Harvard style
and the number of references not less than
three Academic Articles or books.
Please, make sure that there is no Plagiarism
Assignment 2:
Create a Monthly/Weekly/Daily log. Analyze it according to the
importance of the activities listed. Suggest
ways to reduce time on the unimportant activities in favor of the
more important ones.
Minimum number of words 500, referencing with Harvard style

and the number of references not less than
three Academic Articles or books.
Please, make sure that there is no Plagiarism
Introduction
All projects consume resources, including time and money, in
order to deliver a
product of a particular scope and quality. There is thus always a
tension between
the extent of resource input and the extend of product output.
Additionally, there
is also tension between project management activities and
project development
activities.
Dawson (2009: 4.1) provides a graphical presentation of this:

Project Management
Project Management concerns the planning and conduct of the
project by
controlling and checking project progress, monitoring
milestones and
deliverables, and managing risk.
The effort involved in project management should account for
not more than 10%
of the overall effort but it will not be evenly distributed, as
most of it is expended
towards the start of the project. A project can be conceived as
product
2
development that is concerned with achieving the aims and
objectives of the
project by producing the deliverables in accordance with the
project plan, while
optimizing scope and quality of the deliverables relative to the
resources
available.
Project Stages

From a project management perspective, projects proceed in
five stages:
1. Definition - Deciding on a project; making a project proposal
2. Planning - Detailed planning of the project
3. Initiation - Organizing work (in particular, group work);
literature survey
4. Control - Monitoring the progress of the project
5. Closure -Delivering/deploying result of the project; preparing
final presentation;
writing up reports
Project Definition
Aims and objectives
It is important to decide and define a clear specification of what
the project is to
achieve and adhere to it. Wavering between different aims
might be disastrous to
the conduct of the project. Aims are broad statements of intent
that identify the
project's purpose.
Example:
Evaluate an Artificial Neural Network to predict stock market
indices
Objectives elaborate on the Aims and identify specific
measurable achievements.
This is accomplished by using quantitative and qualitative
measures by which the
progress and completion of the project can be judged.

Example:
1. Complete a literature search and literature review of existing
stock
market prediction techniques
2. Develop a suitable Artificial Neural Network model
3. Identify and collect suitable data for analysis and evaluation
for the
developed model
4. Evaluate the model using appropriate statistical techniques
5. Complete final report
The SMART Objectives
3
You might check the quality of your objectives by evaluating
them according to
the SMART scheme, were the objectives should be:
• Specific
• Measurable
• Appropriate
• Realistic
• Time-related
Example:

Complete a literature search and literature review of existing
stock market
prediction techniques
S: Is it specific? Does it tell us what will be done?
M: Is it measurable? How will we know to what extent and to
what level of
quality the objective has been completed?
A: Is it appropriate? Does it relate to and support our aims?
R: Is it realistic? Can we realistically expect to achieve this
objective?
T: Do we have a sound estimate of its duration?
Project planning
The objectives of project planning are to identify what is
needed to be done, to
clarify the order in which tasks need to be done, to determine
how long each task
will take, and, if needed, to redefine if there are problems. This
is accomplished
by steps, which are:
1. Work breakdown
2. 2 Time estimates
3. Milestone identification
4. Activity sequencing
5. Scheduling
6. Replanning
Dawson (2009: 4.3, 4.3.1-4.3.3) provides the following figures
which form the
basis for the following discussion:

4
Work Breakdown
The first step of project planning is to identify the tasks that
need to be done. The
starting point of your analysis should be the project objectives.
Having specified
this, break your objectives down into increasingly refined levels
of detail.
Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) are graphical constructs that
are used to
visualize the process of breaking the project down into details,
as shown in the
figure above. The thing to remember is that tasks at all levels
need to be
separate from one another. When should the breakdown stop? A
good estimate
is to continue to break your project down into smaller tasks
until each task takes
up no less than 5% of the total effort.

5
Time Estimates
It is of utmost importance to make reasonably accurate
estimates of the effort
needed for completion and the duration until completion of each
leaf node of the
work breakdown structure.
If the estimate exceeds the total time available for the project,
either modify the
objectives and work breakdown or reduce and reallocate time
between tasks. A
follow up of the time estimates based on your progress is to be
conducted
throughout the project. Otherwise, without prior warning, you
might find yourself
missing your targets. The progress and the updated time
estimates should be
reported in the Monthly Reports.
Milestone Identification
Several events along the development path, known as
milestones, are more
important then others. These are significant steps towards the
completion of the
project and consist of intermediate goals at which to aim.
The following figure from (Dawson, 2009: 4.3.4) is an example
of these steps:

For the DS module, such major milestones should be the
completion of the
proposal, the completion of the specification and design stage
and the
dissertation submission date. However, the period from the
approval of the
specification and design stage to the completion of the
dissertation, where most
of the effort is concentrated, might call for an additional
breakdown of milestones.
Activity Sequencing
The work breakdown structure states the order in which tasks
are to be
performed. To represent the order and inter-dependency of
tasks, we can use
activity networks. The text book discusses these management
tools, which will
briefly repeated below.
6
Activity-on-the-node-diagram
Those of you who have taken the PM module might prefer to
skip this part of the
lecture as the subject was covered in that module to great
length.

Tasks are represented in these diagrams by (rectangular) nodes,
while arrows
indicate the order in which they need to be performed.
Example:
Task A has to be completed before tasks B and C can start
Task B and C can be done independently (in parallel)
Task D can only start once both tasks B and C have been
completed
The next step is to estimate the duration of the four tasks, and
for our
example they are estimated as follows:
Activity Effort
Task A 4 weeks
Task B 4 weeks
Task C 8 weeks
Task D 2 weeks
In order to simplify the calculations we’ll assume that each
month has four
weeks, that there are no breaks or holidays, and that the project
starts on 1
January.
What then is the start date for each of the tasks, and when
would the whole

project finish?
Clearly task A finishes on 1 February, which becomes the start
date for
tasks B and C. Task B, lasting 4 weeks, will be finished by 1
March, while
Task C, lasting 8 weeks, will finish by 1 April. As Task D can
begin only
when both tasks B and C are finished, it can start only on 1
April to be
finished on 15 April.
7
We should now define two additional terms: Critical Path which
is the longest-
duration path through a network and which identifies the tasks
in the project that
must not be delayed; and Slack Time, which is the time that can
be “wasted” in a
certain activity without prolonging the whole project. In order
to determine the
critical paths, do the following:
• Work backwards from the end to the start
• As long as there is only one preceding task, this task must be
on the
critical path
• If there is more than one preceding task, only the task(s)
which force the

start time of the next task are on the critical path
(There can be more than one critical path)
Returning to our example, it is clear that the critical path is A
→C →D, that
the total duration of the project is 4+8+2=14 weeks, and that
there is a
slack time in task B of 4 weeks (as the parallel running of task
C lasts 8
weeks)
Time estimates can be done using software such as Project, by
Microsoft, or
similar Gantt/Pert software (Gantt, 2006), but for a short
duration project, which is
in essence a linear sequence of a few steps or events, software
is most likely not
needed to control it.
Re-planning
Re-planning needs to be done if you try to achieve too much in
too little time.
The way to handle this is to iterate the following steps until you
get a correct
schedule:
1. Rethink the interdependencies between activities
2. Redo estimates for effort and duration of each task
3. Reschedule tasks
4. Rethink the aims and objectives of your project
5. Redo the work breakdown structure

Please note that no plan is perfect and that no plan is set in
stone.
Rolling Wave Planning
This is a phased iterative approach to project planning which
fits incremental
development well, such a program developing. The approach
would be:
1. Define planning packages for your project with:
8
a. Resource requirements
b. Macro level deliverables
c. Macro level dependencies
2. Execute the following loop
a. Determine which planning package has to be done next (first)
b. Make a detailed plan for this planning package
c. Execute the plan
d. Re-adjust the remaining planning packages based on what
happened

Risk Management
Introduction
This process runs concurrently throughout the project. It
involves the
identification of risks at the project's outset and the control of
those risks as the
project progresses. There are four main stages of the risk
management process:
1. Identify risks
2. Assess impacts of risks
3. Alleviate critical risks
4. Control risks
Identifying Risks
The following table illustrates the different types of risk:
9
Event-driven risks are those that occur unsolicited and with no
prior warning.
They can be technical, such as a failing component in our
computer, or non-
technical like a DA leaving, or a colleague that should have
helped us switching
his work location. These are hard to predict and often never

considered.
Evolving risks, which are also of the two types, might first
appear as minor
problems that evolve into bigger ones. They might be brushed
aside at the
beginning, but if not taken care off might turn out to be to show
stoppers.
In order to identify the risks, we should look for “Risk
Triggers” (a.k.a Risk
Symptoms), which are events happening during the course of a
project that might
indicate problems or that one of the identified risks is
increasingly likely to occur.
Examples:
• Missing preliminary milestones in your project
• Struggling with a straightforward implementation of a
component
• Problems with arranging a meeting with a client
Assessing the Impact of Risks
We can formulate the impact of the risk through the following
formula:
Risk impact = (Likelihood) x (Consequence)

Example:
What will happen if a severe earthquake occurs in Britain?
• Likelihood is low
• Residential building → Consequences are low
• Nuclear power plant → Consequences are catastrophic
Therefore, when designing Nuclear power plants we tend to
build them
earthquake-proof, while residential buildings are not built that
way.
As an example, we can assign values to the Likelihood and the
Consequences
as follows (Dawson, 2009: 4.4.3):
Risk Likelihood
Low 1
Medium 2
High 3
Risk Consequences
Very Low 1
10
Low 2
Medium 3
High 4
Very high 5

Substituting these values into the Risk Impact formula, we can
create a scale of
Risk Impact from 1 (1 x 1) up to 15 (3 x 5).We can thus qualify
the Risk Impact by
a qualitative measure and, thus decided, rank which one we
intend to service,
resolve or design in such a way as to minimize its impact.
Another known approach is applying the 80/20 rule. This
maintains that 20% of
your risks cause 80% of your problems. Thus, the 20% top
ranking risks are the
critical ones. This evolves into the RAG (Red/Amber/Green,
named after the
traffic light colors and used in medical reports) report, using the
weights from the
above tables.
• Red signals risks with impact greater than 10 → critical risks
• Amber signals risks with impact between 6 and 10 → deserve
some
attention
• Green signals risks with impact smaller than 6 → can be
ignored
Alleviating the Critical Risks
Contingency
This is defined as accepting that the risk is going to occur and
putting something
in place to deal with it when it does.

Examples:
• Hard disk crash: But I have a backup, which I took the bother
to do
regularly;
• Time over-run: But I took the trouble to include some slack
time in
each of the project’s activities.
Deflection:
Here we try to pass some of the work to someone or something
else.
Example:
• Required software not available → use existing software
instead of
developing it yourself (But that, of course, is no solution when
the
project consists of software development).
Avoidance
Here we try to reduce the likelihood that the risk will occur at
all.
11
Examples:

• Use of programming languages
o Use one that you know instead of one that you don't
• Development of a complex algorithm
o Modify an existing algorithm
Controlling Risks
You should plan a risk strategy in which you’ll consider how
you will go about
managing and controlling the risks that you might have
identified. For example:
how and when would you notice a time over-run? What do you
propose to do in
such a case?
Checking critical risks should be done at regular intervals (e.g.
weekly) as well as
at the end of particular project stages and at correspondences
with your
supervisor (a good time and place to do it is through the
Monthly Report). The
questions that should be asked in this context are:
• How and when will you check the risk triggers identified?
• How and when will you invoke your contingency plans?
• How and when will you update your critical risk list?
Remember that risk likelihood and risk consequences change
over time.
Time Management
You cannot gain time; only manage it well. In order to do that

you must decide (i)
what you want to do; (ii) find out what you are currently doing;
and then (iii)
change what you are doing in order to free more time to do what
you need to do;
then (iv) time manage these activities so that you’ll achieve
what you set out to
do.
We discussed the concept of WBS at the beginning of this
seminar, which
identifies the activities that you need to do in order to
accomplish your project.
These can be categorized as long-term goals and as short-term
goals. These
should be managed separately as their granularity is so
different, however. For
this activity of research, the long term is measured in months
and weeks, while
the short term is measured in days and hours.
As we don’t operate in seclusion, there are several components
that should be
considered above and beyond the production of the project, such
as family life,
social activities, and leisure activities. Each activity cuts into
other activities. Start
with the long term goals and then build the day to day handling
of the short term
goals in them. Decide how much you can spend on each of the
long term
activities and which one you are ready to sacrifice (for the
duration of the project),
and then break the remaining ones into it sub-components.

12
A good technique is to produce time logs which list the
activities, when they
should be performed, and what their results should be. The idea
is to arrange
your days and weeks into meaningful chunks of time when you
can accomplish
useful work. The most important aspect is to measure yourself
whether you
accomplish what you meant to do and how do you progress
when compared with
the (long range) timetable that you supplied with your proposal.
The idea is that
this feedback will be used to modify the time logs if needed.
Be aware of wasting your time due to:
Procrastination - delaying things to a later date than they should
be done. If you
have enough self discipline, you might control it by deciding to
do the deed or
split it up into smaller chunks that can be handled. If you can’t
control it, use
someone to monitor you. This is one of the reasons why we
place such a great
importance to the Monthly Reports.
Grains of Time – these are small periods of time between tasks
that tend to
accumulate into substantial periods. Clever management can
make use of these
short periods by doing all kind of small needed cores.

Interruptions and short breaks– try to limit their number and
their duration. On the
other hand some people find that interrupting a stress of long
learning and taking
a “sudden” beak helps them. Evaluate what is best for you.
Perfectionism – “the best is the enemy of the better”. If the
results are good
enough, leave them at that. Don’t waste long periods perfecting
just few
percentages of the result.
Long Breaks - you might, of course, take longer breaks for
work, family, or
vacation reasons. Try to keep the project ticking, even if in a
minor way. Take an
article to read during the break, draw a rough design of a future
activity. Don’t
push the project totally aside. It might be difficult to return to
it.
An interactive tool that might help you in your long period
management is the
Minnesota Assignment Calculator, while a tool for the short
period management
is the Learner Daily Planner:

Assignment 1 Identify elements of concern (e.g. resources.docx

Assignment 1 Identify elements of concern (e.g. resources.docx

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