Professional Documents
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FINALS
Engr. Bibiano Alonzo
(Instructor)
Learning Objective:
(nurulizah.anuar@mmu.edu.my ,pkng@mmu.edu.my)
Project management has emerged as a field of practice that is being used increasingly by organizations to achieve their
business goals. Since the concept ‘survival of the fittest’ best describes today’s business environment, good project
management performance assessment tools are needed in order to make an organization ‘the best of the best’. Project
completion within time and cost, while maintaining quality is very important for the success of projects. Therefore, the
purpose of this paper is to analyse the key variables of time, cost and quality and determine their roles in project
management performance. A problem was constructed together with different scenarios to analyse the relations of these
variables according to conditions given. With the help of Microsoft Project, the authors were able to narrow down the
findings in all scenarios and summarize the patterns of strategies based on these variables to make an appropriate
decision on planning the project.
I. INTRODUCTION
Pheng and Chuan [3] suggest that in project management, a project manager is vital and
indispensable in any project as it is people formulating the processes and systems who deliver the
projects. It is generally agreed that to be considered successful, a project must be fit for purpose
and it must have achieved its delivery targets [4].
There is a vast literature covering the factors that influence project success. Thamhain [5] suggests
that project success depends on effective multidisciplinary efforts, involving teams of people and
support organizations interacting in a highly complex, intricate, and sometimes even chaotic way.
Bonner, Ruekert and Walker [6] reiterate that cross-functional teams improve both the speed and
success of new product development (NPD) projects by combining members from multiple
functional specialties to bring greater diversity of viewpoint and richer sources of information for
the many decisions inherent in the development process. Some engineers regard their projects as a
success simply because of the good relation among the stakeholders, even though all of the project
cost, time and quality are performed below the project baselines [7]. In this study, we narrow down
the key variables relating to the success of project performances to be time, cost and quality since
they are the most standard measures used in previous studies [6, 8, 9].
A. Time
In project management, time is an intangible resource that is unique because it is absolutely finite and
time availability of a project is defined as the availability of time needed to do a job assigned [3]. Project
time overrun indicates an extension of project completion time from the planned duration [9].
According to Ling [10], project managers manage three areas relating to project time which involve
maximizing construction speed, maximizing delivery speed and minimizing schedule growth. However,
Bonner, Ruekert and Walker [6] explains that wellintentioned interventions by management might force
a team to change direction and invalidate some activities already completed, thereby lengthening the
project’s completion time, sending it over budget, and damaging team morale.
Usually, the longer it takes to identify project discrepancies, the more serious the potential damage is
and the more complex and costly the corrective measures will be to the project [11]. Parker and
Skitmore [12] posit that projects with short durations may be advantageous for project managers to
lead and manage their individual projects from concept to closeout to minimize the effects on
performance. Conversely, Nidumolu [13] argues that tightly controlled processes which result in strict
adherence to time and cost estimates may sometimes inadequately explore product functionality,
thereby sacrificing the long-term flexibility of the technology for short-term user needs.
B. Cost
From a mathematical point of view, Lin [14] suggests that each activity has a duration and
corresponding cost attributes. Lin further emphasizes that the activity cost increases with the shortening
of the duration and the duration increases if we decrease the activity cost.
In reality, most large, complex development projects experience substantial cost and schedule
overruns [3]. Usually, projects taking more time cost more money [9]. In a rapidly growing
construction market, the need to estimate the cost of quality in projects becomes a vital task
seeing as the objective of achieving a product with a good quality is not only to meet the customer
requirements, but also to do it at the lowest cost [15]. According to Iyer and Jha [16], more often
than not, timely help from top management in getting the resources or getting critical decision can
have far reaching implications on cost performance, especially when dealing with short duration
projects where each day of delay can have large detrimental effect on cost.
C. Quality
While project management success focuses upon the project processes and the successful
accomplishments of cost and time objectives, product success deals with the quality of the
project’s final product and the quality objectives of the project [3]. Iyer, LaPlaca and Sharma [17]
point out that successful commercialization of quality products requires due attention to the
complete supply chain (both suppliers and distributors).
However, high failure rates suggest that management’s knowledge of the transformation process
whereby ideas are turned into successful quality products is far from perfect, particularly for more
innovative development projects [6]. Although the ability to quickly introduce new products and
adopt new processes has become an important way of competing, the introduction of successful
products has become exceedingly complex and require a wide variety of assets, resources, and
capabilities [18].
To avoid the waste of scarce recourses, it is necessary to boost up project performance seeing
as it is an intangible thing, especially in case of management performance whereby choosing tools
to assess it is a hard job [1]. The complexity and the innovativeness of the project (e.g., line
extensions vs. new-to-the-world products) may influence the magnitude of the technical,
operational and marketing challenges that confront the firm [19]. According to Bonner, Ruekert,
and Walker [6], although traditional formal diagnostic controls play a role in management’s
attempt to keep NPD teams on an appropriate strategic track, too much of it may constrain the
team’s creativity, impede their progress, and injure their ultimate performance.
From the aforementioned findings, many researchers have identified gaps in research areas
affecting engineering project performance such as project complexity, team creativity and
management control. In the subsequent section, a problem is developed and analysed in relation
to these project management variables and research gaps using Microsoft Office Project. In order
to verify the influence of the 3 variables of cost, time and quality, a problem was structured
together with different scenarios so as to analyse the relations of these 3 variables in accordance
to conditions made. Considering Table I, the details of the project are provided. As can be seen, the
warehouse construction job contains 31 elements and total project durations of 245 days.
During the study, the company has allocated an amount of time and money for the project, as follows:
TABLE I
DETAILS OF ACTIVITIES /DURATION AND ACTIVITIES PREDECESSORS
However, in this problem, 3 scenarios need to be considered. The 3 scenarios are stated as follows:
Scenario 1: The project completion period is fixed, despite the fact of having limited resource
availability.
Scenario 2: The Company would like to reduce the duration of construction period with minimum
cost imposed.
Scenario 3: The Company would like to remain the quality and at the same time reduce the duration
of construction.
In this project, the 3 scenarios will be analyzed and modelled using Microsoft Office Project. In
addition to that, a manual analysis is also carried out in order to confirm the findings. From the
findings of the analysis, a discussion and conclusion can be drawn with relevance to the variables of
project management as explained in the preceding introduction.
IV. METHODOLOGY
This section identifies the software and tools being used for this project to analyse the 3 scenarios
and the methods and terminologies used to generate the outcome of the analysis. In this project,
Microsoft Office Project shall be used to formulate a Gantt Chart Schedule and also analyze the
project’s critical path with respect to the scenarios that are given in the preceding introduction. The
application creates critical path schedules, although critical chain and event chain methodology
third-party add-ons are available. Schedules can be resource levelled, and chains are visualized in a
Gantt chart. Additionally, Microsoft Office Project can recognize different classes of users. These
different classes of users can have differing access levels to projects, views, and other data. Custom
objects such as calendars, views, tables, filters and fields are stored in an enterprise global which is
shared by all users. If the project is required to have an earlier finish date, the dates of the critical
path tasks must be brought over. This is also known as crashing a project, i.e. to decrease a project's
overall duration without changing task relationships. Crashing a project typically requires assigning
additional resources to tasks.
V. RESULTS
This section explains the results generated from Microsoft Project in accordance with the 3 analyses
that were considered. The start date for all 3 cases is assumed to be 5 January 2010.
The project duration is required to be fixed, and with limited resources, Saturdays and Sundays are not
considered as working days. The overall timeline will be 175 days and the finish date is 6 September
2010.
The project duration is required to be reduced, and with minimum cost imposed, Saturdays and
Sundays are defined as general working times. The duration retains the value of 175 days but the finish
date is brought forward to 28 June 2010.
The project duration is required to be reduced, while quality is maintained. Using the PERT Analysis,
the optimistic, expected, and pessimistic durations as well as duration weights are defined for each task.
The duration weights for the optimistic, expected, and pessimistic cases are assumed to be 1, 4 and 1,
respectively (the weight values must sum to 6)T
It is assumed that the expected duration is the specified number of days as in Table I, optimistic
duration is 7 days earlier (for tasks whose durations are already 7 days, their optimistic durations are
assumed to stick to 7 days) and pessimistic duration is 7 days later. The durations generated in
accordance with these cases are shown in Table II.
VI. DISCUSSIONS
This section discusses the results as per generated in the previous section and justifications as to why
certain outcomes and assumptions were selected for the project.
This scenario requires the project schedule to be fixed and not manipulated in any way, with the
knowledge that the resources provided were limited. For this study, it is assumed that with limited
resources available, the cost/budget of this project is controlled very tightly. Usually, projects taking
more time cost more money [9]. Therefore, it would be a wiser decision to stick to the current schedule
developed and not change any essence concerning the duration of the project.
After using Microsoft Project to analyse this scenario, the findings prove that if we were to not
consider Saturdays and Sundays as working days, our project overall timeline will be 175 days. As
compared to the scheduled target of project completion which is 245 days, the duration of all
activities and predecessors as structured in Table I currently not just satisfies the timeline but also
performs beyond its expectations by being reduced by a period of 70 days.
For this scenario, since the project time is required to be fixed, and resources are limited, there
should not be any changes to the activities and durations in Table I. The results for this scenario are
merely depicting the activities and durations as established in Table I in Microsoft Project.
For this particular scenario, since the breakdown of the activity costs was not provided, it can be
assumed a minimum cost imposed for this project is similar to not sustaining the current costs
allocated for the project. Therefore, the only entity that can be manipulated here is the project time.
Lin [14] suggests that each activity has a duration and corresponding cost attributes. Lin further
emphasizes that the activity cost increases with shortening of the duration and the duration
increases if we decrease the activity cost. Based on Lin’s theory, in order to fix project costs for
minimum costs imposed, the duration of each activity in this scenario should not be altered.
Therefore, a simple answer for this would be to allow the project schedule to remain as it is seeing
as 175 days of completion already satisfies the target of 245 days of completion.
However, the overall duration can still be decreased by including additional days of work for this
scenario. This action does not require the change of the specific activity durations, but merely
considering additional days in a week as working days, such as Saturdays and
Sundays. For this study, it was identified that if Saturdays and Sundays were included for this
particular project, the overall project’s duration was shown to be still the same, which is 175 days.
However, by doing this, the timeline of the project can be shortened or brought forward by
approximately 2.5 months.
Projects with short durations may be advantageous for project managers to lead and manage their
individual projects from concept to closeout to minimize the effects on performance [12]. For a
shorter duration of 175 days with weekends considered, this project should be able to even
minimize its costs. Nevertheless, budget overruns are still a risk due to the amount of overtime
needed to be paid to employees on Saturdays and Sundays. Also, resource procurements on the
weekends may impose challenges for the projects’ completion time and cause the extra work on the
weekends to be an immaterial effort.
For scenario 3, once again, seeing as there are no breakdown of costs involved in this problem, the
focus in analyzing this scenario will be on the project’s timeline. Since cost may not be a controlled
variable in this scenario, efforts to focus on quality and reducing project duration can be made.
Using Microsoft Project’s function, a decision making analysis was able to be made based on optimistic,
expected and pessimistic durations. This application allows the capability to breakdown the durations in
Table I into the best case, more likely and worst case scenarios.
From the durations generated in Table II, the findings portray that the optimistic duration saves the
project timeline by about 112 days with reference to 245 days (targeted duration) and the pessimistic
duration saves the project timeline by 7 days. Analysing this situation, it would not be logical to concur
with the pessimistic duration as the timeline is 7 days away and too close to the targeted duration of
completion which is 245 days. Thus, the pessimistic duration is not a suitable timeline to be considered
since it does not reduce the current overall duration significantly.
Further analysis of the durations show that only 2 types of duration, which is the optimistic and
expected duration are able to meet and exceed target expectations. It would clearly make sense to
consider the optimistic duration as the ideal schedule for the project. However, the optimistic duration
poses a risk since this involves activities to be expedited, leading to crash activities that can possibly
jeopardize the quality of the project work and cause rework to occur which can exhaust the usage of
available resources. In this context, duration is reduced, but it may be at the price of quality and cost,
depending on how well the management handles it.
Thus, a more suitable decision would be to stick to the structured schedule provided once again since it
poses no risks of crashing activities. In other words, the expected duration would be a better choice of
scheduling for this particular project. Furthermore, the timeline of the project is still significantly
reduced with respect to the targeted duration by 70 days. This satisfies the scenario as there would be
lesser risks imposed in jeopardizing quality of works and project time is still significantly reduced.
VII. CONCLUSION
Based on the 3 scenarios, we can summarize the patterns of strategies based on the project
performance variables of time, cost and quality.
The first scenario which focuses on fixing project time with limited resources clearly relates to
the cost and time performance emphasis in the project. By stating that there are limited resources
available, we can assume that cost was controlled very tightly even though the time of the project was
not required to be reduced. This scenario is consistent with the findings of Olson, Walker, Ruekert and
Bonner [19] which states that efficiency measures are concerned with the amount of resources required
to complete a project, making money among the most constrained and important resources necessary
for developing new products.
The second scenario which desires the project timeline to be reduced with the project costs
minimized as well also involves the variables of time performance and cost performance. Although
the costs of the activities here are unknown, but based on the study of Iyer and Jha [16], which
states that when dealing with short duration projects, each day of delay can have large detrimental
effect on cost, we are able to assume that by reducing the project timeline alone, the project costs
can be reduced as well. Microsoft Project was able to further reduce the project timeline by
including Saturdays and Sundays in the form of overtime in this scenario. Using this capability, it was
found that although the duration of the project which takes 175 days remained unchanged, but the
completion date was shifted from early September to late June. However, this method cannot
promise that there will be no budget overruns or lack of resources, as additional wages and
contingency resources are needed to be prepared for work on weekends. Thus, it was more
appropriate to consider the current schedule of 175 days which still meets the completion target of
245 days. The third scenario explains that the quality of the work must be sustained with the
reduction of the project timeline. By using the 3 types of durations available in Microsoft Project, a
decision to go for the expected duration which was 175 days, was able to be made. A shorter
duration from the optimistic duration was not considered due to the risks of having quality issues
upon crashing the activities in the process of reducing the overall duration. This is also consistent
with the findings of Nidumolu [13] which argues that tightly controlled processes which result in
strict adherence to time and cost estimates may sometimes inadequately explore product
functionality, thereby sacrificing the long-term flexibility of the technology for short-term user
needs. In conclusion, the most appropriate answer for all 3 scenarios with accordance to the
analysis made was actually to not change anything. The expected duration according to Table I
proved that the overall duration of the activities were still able to satisfy the project’s targeted
timeline of 245 days. With the help of Microsoft Project, we were able to narrow down the findings
in all 3 scenarios to make an appropriate decision on planning the project duration.
REFERENCES
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[3] L. S. Pheng and Q. T. Chuan, "Environmental factors and work performance of project managers in the construction industry,"
International Journal of Project Management, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 24–37, 2006.
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ARTICLE 2 :
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
College of Engineering, Architecture & Technology
Laoag City
POST -EVALUATION
WEEK 01- 04
Name:_____________________________
Section:____________________________
Instruction:
(Format)
TITLE OF THE ARTCLE
AUTHORS
SUMMARY
The introductory paragraph summarizes the background information and purpose of the
research
(specific questions the study researched).
What is the purpose of the study? What questions were asked?
How did the study address these questions?
What assumptions did the author make?
What were the major findings?
What surprised you or struck you as interesting?
What questions are still unanswered?
METHODS
Explain the methods that were used to investigate the research questions (use past
tense).
CONCLUSION / RECOMMENDATION
REVIEWED BY:
STUDENT NAME
Course & year