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Project management : Pert and Cpm
- 1. 1 Project Management :PERT & CPM Author: Shashank kapoor* Faculty of Engineering, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Dayalbagh Rd. ,Agra Abstract : Project management is the art of managing the project and its deliverables with a view to produce finished products or service. There are many ways in which a project can be carried out and the way in which it is executed is project management. It also includes identifying requirements, establishing clear and achievable objectives, balancing the competing demands from the different stakeholders and ensuring that a commonality of purpose is achieved. It is clear that unless there is a structured and scientific approach to the practice of management, organizations would find themselves adrift in the Ocean called organizational development and hence would be unable to meet the myriad challenges that the modern era throws at them. Hence, the importance of project management to organizations cannot be emphasized more and the succeeding paragraphs provide some reasons why organizations must take the practice of project management seriously. Introduction Great project management means much more than keeping project management’s iron triangle in check, delivering on time, budget, and scope; it unites clients and teams, creates a vision for success and gets everyone on the same page of what’s needed to stay on track for success. When projects are managed properly, there’s a positive impact that reverberates beyond delivery of ‘the stuff’. 1. Strategic Alignment Project management is important because it ensures what is being delivered, is right, and will deliver real value against the business opportunity. *for correspondence Shashank kapoor B.Tech IIIrd yr, Mechanical Specialisation in CS (154169) Shashankkapoor1994@gmail.com Every client has strategic goals and the projects that we do for them advance those goals. Project management is important because it ensures there’s rigor in architecting projects properly so that they fit well within the broader context of our client’s strategic frameworks Good project management ensures that the goals of projects closely align with the strategic goals of the business. 2. Leadership Project management is important because it brings leadership and direction to projects. Without project management, a team can be like a ship without a rudder; moving but without direction, control or purpose. Leadership allows and enables a team to do their best work. Project management provides leadership and vision, motivation, removing roadblocks, coaching and inspiring the team to do their best work.
- 2. 2 3. Clear Focus& Objectives Project management is important because it ensures there’s a proper plan for executing on strategic goals. Where project management is left to the team to work out by themselves, you’ll find teams work without proper briefs, projects lack focus, can have vague or nebulous objectives, and leave the team not quite sure what they’re supposed to be doing, or why. As project managers, we position ourselves to prevent such a situation and drive the timely accomplishment of tasks, by breaking up a project into tasks for our teams. Oftentimes, the foresight to take such an approach is what differentiates good project management from bad. Breaking up into smaller chunks of work enables teams to remain focused on clear objectives, gear their efforts towards achieving the ultimate goal through the completion of smaller steps and to quickly identify risks, since risk management is important in project management. 4. Realistic Project Planning Project management is important because it ensures proper expectations are set around what can be delivered, by when, and for how much. Without proper project management, budget estimates and project delivery timelines can be set that are over- ambitious or lacking in analogous estimating insight from similar projects. Ultimately this means without good project management, projects get delivered late, and over budget. 5. Quality Control Projects management is important because it ensures the quality of whatever is being delivered, consistently hits the mark. Projects are also usually under enormous pressure to be completed. Without a dedicated project manager, who has the support and buy-in of executive management, tasks are underestimated, schedules tightened and processes rushed. The result is bad quality output. Dedicated project management ensures that not only does a project have the time and resources to deliver, but also that the output is quality tested at every stage. 6. Risk Management Project management is important because it ensures risks are properly managed and mitigated against to avoid becoming issues. Risk management is critical to project success. The temptation is just to sweep them under the carpet, never talk about them to the client and hope for the best. But having a robust process around the identification, management and mitigation of risk is what helps prevent risks from becoming issues. 7. Orderly Process Project management is important because it ensures the right people do the right things, at the right time – it ensures proper project process is followed throughout the project lifecycle. Surprisingly, many large and well- known companies have reactive planning processes. But reactivity – as opposed to proactivity – can often cause projects to go into survival mode. This is a when teams fracture, tasks duplicate, and
- 3. 3 planning becomes reactivecreating inefficiency and frustration in the team. 8. Continuous Oversight Project management is important because it ensures a project’s progress is tracked and reported properly. Status reporting might sound boring and unnecessary – and if everything’s going to plan, it can just feel like documentation for documentation’s sake. But continuous project oversight, ensuring that a project is tracking properly against the original plan, is critical to ensuring that a project stays on track. 9. Subject Matter Expertise Project management is important because someone needs to be able to understand if everyone’s doing what they should. With a few years experience under their belt, project managers will know a little about a lot of aspects of delivering the projects they manage. They’ll know everything about the work that their teams execute; the platforms and systems they use, and the possibilities and limitations, and the kinds of issues that typically occur. 10.Learning from Success and Failure Project management is important because it learns from the successes and failures of the past. Project management can break bad habits and when you’re delivering projects, it’s important to not make the same mistakes twice. Project managers use retrospectives or post project reviews to consider what went well, what didn’t go so well and what should be done differently for the next project. PERT Project Evaluation and Review Techniques is commonly abbreviated to PERT. PERT is a method of analyzing the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project. It incorporates uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion- oriented, and is used more in projects where time is the major factor rather than cost. It is applied to very large-scale, one-time, complex, non-routine infrastructure and Research and Development projects. Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) offers a management tool, which relies "on arrow and node diagrams of activities and events: arrows represent the activities or work necessary to reach the events or nodes that indicate each completed phase of the total project." CPM The critical path method (CPM) is a project modeling technique developed in the late 1950s by Morgan R. Walker of DuPont and James E. Kelley Jr. of Remington Rand. The essential technique for using CPM: is to construct a model of the project that includes the following: 1. A list of all activities required to complete the project (typically
- 4. 4 categorized within awork breakdown structure), 2. The time (duration) that each activity will take to complete, 3. The dependencies between the activities and, 4. Logical end points such as milestones or deliverable items. Using these values, CPM calculates the longest path of planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the project, and the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer. This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add up to the longest overall duration, regardless if that longest duration has float or not. This determines the shortest time possible to complete the project. There can be 'total float' (unused time) within the critical path. For example, if a project is testing a solar panel and task 'B' requires 'sunrise', there could be a scheduling constraint on the testing activity so that it would not start until the scheduled time for sunrise. This might insert dead time (total float) into the schedule on the activities on that path prior to the sunrise due to needing to wait for this event. This path, with the constraint-generated total float would actually make the path longer, with total float being part of the shortest possible duration for the overall project. In other words, individual tasks on the critical path prior to the constraint might be able to be delayed without elongating the critical path; this is the 'total float' of that task. However, the time added to the project duration by the constraint is actually critical path drag, the amount by which the project's duration is extended by each critical path activity and constraint. A project can have several, parallel, near critical paths; and some or all of the tasks could have 'free float' and/or 'total float'. An additional parallel path through the network with the total durations shorter than the critical path is called a sub- critical or non-critical path. Activities on sub-critical paths have no drag, as they are not extending the project's duration. CPM analysis tools allow a user to select a logical end point in a project and quickly identify its longest series of dependent activities (its longest path). These tools can display the critical path (and near critical path activities if desired) as a cascading waterfall that flows from the project's start (or current status date) to the selected logical end point. References 1. https://www.slideshare.net/dubey1992 /pert-cpm-project-management 2. https://www.slideshare.net/iirmjaipur/p roject-management-pert-and-cpm 3. www.idc.iitb.ac.in/~chakku/dm/06_Per t%20cpm.ppt 4. www.interventions.org/pertcpm/ 5. www.math.upatras.gr/~tsantas/.../Hillie r&Lieberman_7th- edition_Chapter10.pdf 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critic al_path_method 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_ evaluation_and_review_technique 8. https://www.slideshare.net/corvinno/pe rt-presentation-824238
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