Project Management

Chapter 1 questions

1. In the modern world, various needs have appeared and therefore we have Project Management.
And what influenced it:

 The exponential expansion of human knowledge: it allows the increasing number of people
studying how they can resolve problems with development, production, and distribution of
goods and services.
 The growing demand for a broad range of complex, sophisticated, customized goods and
services: How they can resolve problems with satisfying the continuing demand for more
complex and customized products and services.
 The evolution of worldwide competitive markets for the production and consumptions of
goods and services: Through this market competition, the companies, profit or not-for-profit,
need to use quality tools becoming more complex, the responses must come faster and
decisions as sooner as possible.

2. The life cycle of project can be describe like

 The project completion: the project is born, a manager is choice, the project team and initial
resources are assembled, and the work is organized, so the work start with a quick
momentum. However, for completing the final tasks, it will use a lot time, partially because
there are a number of parts that must come together and also because the team members avoid
the final steps
 The required effort: in this cycle, the time is broken into several phases of project life.
Minimal effort is required in the beginning of the project and in the part of planning,
scheduling, monitoring, and controlling the effort has its peak level and will be decreasing
until the end project.

3. There are also real limitations in project management. For example, the simple creation of a
project may be an admission that the parent organization and its managers cannot achieve the desired
results with the help of a functional organization. The PM often lacks the credibility of the position to
match the assigned level of responsibility.

4.

 Importance: The project needs to be important for the eyes of senior management to justify
setting up a special organizational unit outside the routine structure of the organization.
 Scope: the project is complex and can be divided into subtasks that require careful
coordination and control in terms of timing, precedence, cost, and scope.
 Life Cycle with a finite due date: The project has a life cycle, normally, with a slow
beginning to a buildup of size, then peak, begin a decline, and finally must be terminated.
 Interdependencies: Projects often interact with other projects.
 Uniqueness: Every project has some elements unique and it is unique for the organization.
 Resources: The project's limited budget is implied in restricted resources (personal or not).
  Conflict: The members of projects are in almost conflict for the project resources and for
leadership roles on solving projects problems and the manager needs to conciliate his boss
and stakeholders' desires.

5.

 Performance: Required performance to complete a task

 Cost: Budget limit
 Time: Due date

6.

Advantages:

 The main purpose for initiating a project is to accomplish some goal

 Project management increases the likelihood of accomplishing that goal
 Project management gives us someone (the project manager) to spearhead the project and to
hold accountable for its completion

Disadvantages:

 Greater organizational complexity

 Higher probability organizational policy will be violated
 Says managers cannot accomplish the desired outcome
 Conflict

7.

Tasks: A subset of a project, consisting of work packages.

Programs: Often not distinguished from a project, but frequently meant to encompass a group of
similar projects oriented toward a specific goal.

Project: A temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service

Work package: A sub-element of a task at the lowest level in the Work Breakdown Structure, used
to assign costs and values.

8. A project is defined as a sequence of tasks that must be completed to attain a certain outcome. The
term Project refers “to any temporary endeavor with a definite beginning and end”.

9. Projects often interact with other projects being carried out simultaneously by their parent
organization. Typically, these interactions take the form of competition for scarce resources between
projects. Functional departments of an organization (marketing, finance, manufacturing, and the like)
tend to be changeable. Manufacturing may have major involvement throughout. Finance is often
involved at the beginning and accounting at the end, as well as at periodic reporting times. The PM
must keep all these interactions clear and maintain the appropriate interrelationships with all external
groups.

10. Project competes with functional departments for resources and personnel. More serious, with the
growing proliferation of projects, is the project-versus-project conflict for resources within multi-
project organizations. The members of the project team are in almost constant conflict with the
project's resources and for leadership roles in solving project problems. The project manager needs to
deal with conflict for resources within the multi-project organization, with project team conflict, with
the leadership roles in solving project problems, and reconcile the stakeholders and the parent
organization's interests.

11. Direct project goals are finding a perfect balance among Cost, Time, and Scope. The ancillary
project's goals are gains not directly connected to the successes of the project. So, learning new skills
or entering a new market is the ancillary goal.

12. Quasi-projects are not previously planned projects. You know the deadline and general idea about
the scope, schedule, and budget as precisely as possible.