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Assessment 1 – Written or Oral Questions

For an example project (actual or hypothetical), answer the following questions:
1. Outline the time management tools and techniques that you would need to use.
(3 marks)
2. How will you apply these tools and techniques? (4 marks)
What outcomes do you expect? (4 marks)
3. Discuss any limitations of the tools and techniques you have mentioned. (2 marks)
4. Outline how you would use estimation techniques to determine task
duration and resource effort. (4 marks)
5. Explain the procedures for identifying critical path. (3 marks)
6. Describe the procedure in establishing the baseline. Include how you track variances
(planned vs. actual). (6 marks)
7. What are the phases within the life cycle of your project? (3 marks)
What is included within each phase? (6 marks)
8. What is a work breakdown structure? (2 marks)
How can this be applied to your project schedule? (3 marks)
Assessment 1 total: 40 marks
Notes:

1.
The tools and techniques to be used for time management in order to make my actions
effective and make me proactive are:

 To do list: It is important for me to have a to do list in order to know what I am

doing next as well as put them in priority order;
 Weekly review: To focus on the most important things and know that those things
are going to be done by the end of the day or week;
 Time Blocking: It’s a must do to every task I have planned before, leaving time
for the coming up tasks in the following day or week.

2.
In order to apply those techniques, I will begin to set up priorities by using a planning
tool such as Calendars, Computer Programs or a simple Notebook. The next step is to be
organized and try to get rid of clutter, this manner I could handle the information in a
better way. If once the information feels to be too much for me, I would begin to delegate
my tasks to colleagues. I would identify someone to be able to do the task, with high
skills, experience, interest, and needed aspects to be able to finish the task on time.
Finally, I would manage external time, to make sure the team is 100% focused on their
responsibilities and not outside issues that can be resolved out of the work environment.

Considering the mentioned points above, it is expected to have a positive outcome, a

much better work flow as everything is now organized and under control with someone
to help me or any other team member involved in the project.

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3.
There is always the possibility of having changes which can be negative as well as
positive, in this case, it is important to understand the issue, check for what could be
possible solutions, engage the team and most importantly, know how to delegate.

Although I have planned everything, including scope of the project, responsibilities, a lot
of people could come to talk to me or request reasons to be away of the project.

In a nutshell, it is important to understand your limitations, prepare a plan b and make

sure you have drafted all the possible issues you can find during the progress of the
project.

4.
To determinate the duration and effort of my project in order to assign resource I
previously should know how long my project will take, it important for me to have the
big picture of the project, considering all the possible scenarios and have a plan b in place
if things change from what has been scoped.

Effort and determination, it’s always attached with the work that I would need to be done
within the project. Duration is how long the project would take me to be done and time
duration is a skill in project management without it, I will not how long my project will
take me. For this reason, it is important how I should estimate the time and effort, one tip
could be following next steps:

 Understand what is required, identifying the work what needs to be within the
project.
 Decide who you need to involve, I could do the estimates myself, normally the
Brainstorm works good in a group, or ask others to contribute. Make my
estimates, for instance:

1. Estimate the time I need for each task to be completed, how many people and
possible scenarios for the task;
2. The level of detail will depend on the circumstances, but it’s always good to
consider a good and bad scenario;
3. Knowing for unexpected events like sickness, accidents, meetings, equipment
failure.
4. People usually are over optimistic, and it may underestimate the amount of
time that it will take for them to carry out the task. Methods to estimate time are:
Bottom Up, allow you to create an estimate for the whole project. It breaks larger
task down into detailed tasks and then estimate the time needed to make each one.
Top Down, I develop an overview of the expected timeline, using past projects as
reference. It is helpful to compare top‐down estimate against my bottom‐up
estimate.

5.
To start with, Critical Path is a method to determinate the time to complete the project,
this method helps me to highlight tasks that are high priority and cannot be delayed as
well when they need to be done by.
Critical path can be identified:
Early start: In the earliest time and stage to start a predeterminate activity, given priory to
activities that must be completed first.
Early finish: Earliest time for the activity.
Late finish: Latest time that the activity must be done without delaying the whole project.

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Late Start: Latest start date the activity must be started delayed the project. A delay in the
critical path will surely delay the project.
6.
Project Baseline evaluates the success of our project. Otherwise it is not possible to
compare the current status of the project with the start date;
Project baseline establish: Scope baseline: Technical, physical and functional
requirements of the materials to be delivered;
Starting point of agenda: the project schedule and all items support it;
Budget baseline: a budget, usually in a time format, to estimate, monitor and control
project costs;
Quality Score: changes that can affect project performance.
To know how my project has progressed from the beginning I will take a technique to
keep me informed of task are going.
It works as a comparison from the beginning of the project, it’s status and difficulties to
the current status.
For example:
I am a project supervisor our Activity Start and Finish is 15/07/2019 to 15/10/2019
Our baseline start is 05/05/2019 and variance finish is 20/07/2019, due to the variance it
has altered the date of our delivery to 17/10/2019, which represents 2 days of resources to
be provided to support the new finish date.
7.
The projects I have been working on are composed by 4 phases:
The project initiation, in which we consider:
- Scope
- Purpose
- Objectives
- Resources
- Deliverables
- Timescales
- Structure
Then we move to project planning which is important for us to set goals, which can
include:
- Project plan to describe how the team will reach the goals
- Resource plan on what will be necessary to execute the project
- Quality control methods
- Possible risks in order to minimize those risks
- Financial plan to identify financial expenditure
We have then moved to the execution phase, which is a very important phase in every
single project. When working on execution, we want to have deliverables developed and
completed, this phase will most likely start with a meeting in which we have the
management team delegating the responsibilities to the team members.
The tasks during this phase are:
- Cost management
- Risk management
- Time management
- Issue management
- Quality management
- Change management
Evaluation phase is the last phase of our project, it represents the completion of the
project. The project manager will be responsible to create a project punch list considering
things that didn’t get accomplished during the project and work with the team members,
as well as prepare the final project report.

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8.
WBS is a project deliverable that is used by the team to organize the project into sections.
This way the project team can understand everything with more details, breaking down the
project, showing the bigger picture of how it looks like to have it completed.
The best way to think in this phases is to draw outline map of the specific project. It starts
as the top-level deliverable and is discomposed into sub deliverables.
It can be applied in my project by doing brain storms with the team, this would certainly
help everyone to get involved in a creative session, being able to participate in the project
creation and development by presenting creative ideas. Another way I have been thinking
of is to use whiteboards, and after that use Gantt chart to track the project tasks.

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