Key Concepts We Learned From Chapter 9

Chapter 9   Balancing the Trade-off among Cost, Schedule, and Quality

1. Any project with given time, money, and resources will always have its limitation on the cost, schedule, and product quality, properly manage the balance and trade-offs are a critical challenge for the project management. The balance on the cost, schedule, and quality can be taken on project level, business case level, and enterprise level.  
2. Balance on the project level includes re-estimate the project for its definition and work packages, adjust the task assignment so as to effectively use the schedule float, adding manpower for shorten the schedule, using expert to increase productivity, seeking expert resources from outside, partially or completely outsource the project, compress the tasks on the critical path, push people to work over time.  However, all of these attempts will have trade-offs, attention should be paid to analyze best way to apply each effort in a balanced approach.
3. Business case level of balance can be implemented through reducing the product scope, giving fixed phase schedule to make top down scheduled apportion, overlapping tasks with fast tracking, dividing the full product deliver into phased product delivery, using Crosby’s double effort method, and modifying the profit requirement. Again each approach has its limit and trade-offs, one needs to carefully balance them and pick the most efficient way in each case.
4. Enterprise level of balancing should be conducted when we face a challenge from insufficient equipment, personal, and budget. The company has to decide which project to pursue with finite budget and resources. Making these judgment and decisions requires accurate estimation on each individual project against resource, cost, and schedules.

Key Concepts We Learned From Chapter 8

Chapter 8   The Art and Science of Accurate Estimating

1. A successful project plan relies on accurate initial estimation. In the estimation, one should try to avoid several common mistakes: such as making “Ballparks in evaluators” making estimation without complete specifications, confusing between estimate and bid, and padding the estimation with over budget on time and resource. 
2. To accurately make the estimation, one should have the right people to make the estimation. These estimators should be very experienced, key expert of the project, and they must understand the goal and techniques of estimation.  The estimation has to be made based on experiences. A good and accurate estimation go through three phases. It starts with an idea evaluation or a “ballpark estimation”, then conducts the order of magnitude estimation, and finally moves into detail estimation.
3. There are four estimation techniques. The first is the phase estimating. We can break the project into multiple phases and estimate the cost and schedule for one project phase at a time. It on one hand simplify the estimation process, on the other hand, it also helps customer to reduce the risk in the development process. Second is the apportioning. It is a top-down estimating based on a formula derived from historical data in similar projects. In the same time, apportioning helps to divided the project into smaller pieces. The third one is parametric estimates. Base on the large set of historical data, one can develop a solid parametric formula or model to estimate or analyze the project. The fourth technique is the bottom-up estimation, where all the detailed tasks are estimated and the n combined to sum up into the full estimation. It requires more efforts but represent more accurate estimations.
4. Further down the road, we need to build a detailed budget estimate. We should identify the source of data for the detailed budget, adding internal labor cost with using the Burdened labor rate (average labor cost), making internal equipment cost with one time deal or multiple project shared equipment, estimate the external labor and equipment, as well as the material cost.
5. The project manager should ensure the plan generating the good cash flow schedule so as to ensure the continuity of the project in terms of both labor and other resources.

Key Concepts We Learned From Chapter 7

Chapter 7   Realistic Scheduling

1. A successful project relies on a good planning. To ensure a good plan for the project management, we need to follow key steps in developing the detail plan: (1) Create the project definition; (2) Develop a risk management strategy; (3) Build a work breakdown structure; (4) Identify task relationships; (5) Estimate work packages; (6) Calculate initial schedule; (7) Assign ad level resources
2. In identify task relationships, one has to set right sequence or priorities for various work packages. In addition, we should specify the sequence and concurrent constraints for the task relationship. The task relationship should be defined only between work packages, and it should reflect only the sequence constraints between work packages, not the resource constraints.  Proper milestone should be set so as to effectively track the beginning, progress, and finishing of the project.
3. To manage the cost and schedule of the project, one has to build a cost and schedule estimation for each work packages through a bottom up estimating. The cost estimation will include the estimation for labors, equipments, materials, and fixed price bid. The labor estimation should get down to more precise estimation with given work durations.
4. Calculate an initial schedule is a very tedious but important technique. It provides a set of detailed schedule for every work packages. One can use the forward pass to determine the tasks with early start and early finish, use backward pass to handle the late start and late finish dates, and calculate float to address the flexible tasks. To effectively arrange the work packages in the work flow, careful analysis should be conducted to find the critical path for the project with help of Gantt Chat and time scaled networks.
5. Assign and level resource will provide a good optimization for the use of people and equipment. The leveling will rely on four basic process steps: (a) forecast the resource requirements throughout the project for the initial schedule; (b) identify the resource peaks; (c) delay noncritical tasks within their float at each peak; (d) Eliminate the remaining peaks by reevaluating the wok package. One can get help for modern project management software.