SEASON'S GREETING...

Dear Students,

Season's greeting to all of you...

I am just back from my Christmas break and now looking at your assignments. I received a total of 23 drafts from all of you; shall be reviewing them and send back to you soonest possible.

For those of you who have emailed me multiple versions of your draft, I will only look at the latest one that you have emailed me.

PLEASE NOTE THAT I HAVE SET 31-DEC-2009 AS THE LAST DAY I WILL RECEIVE YOUR DRAFT VIA EMAIL.

IF ANY OF YOU STILL WANT ME TO REVIEW YOUR DRAFT AFTER THAT, PLEASE BRING YOUR HARDCOPY TO SHOW ME ON OUR LAST CLASS ON 3-JAN-2010.

Good luck to all!

Assignment : Case 2....Last Remaining Sections

Project Team

In this section, students can write about the importance of the project members to work as a team in order to plan and implement the project. Refer to my notes on the differences between a 'team' and a 'group'.

Students can write about what makes a team and the characteristics of a team in the context of this assignment as well as what kind of stages a group of people go through before becoming a team.

Additionally, as the PM you can also recommended ways to speed up the transition of the group of your team members into a team. This can range from a team-building exercise; re-location of project members into a shared work space; to giving the team with a name for a sense of identity....

Project Leadership

In any project, leadership is very important as project work is usually very stressful and most of the time; team members tend to lose focus of the 'big picture' as they are too focused on the details of the project.

A good project leader (i.e. the Project Manager) will have the ability to ensure his/her team members are always directed towards the common goal of ensuring all project deliverables can be completed within the time, cost and quality constraints.

Points that students may write about in this section include:

i.) What kind of leadership style is required in managing this project? What are your reasons or justifications of selecting this leadership style against the other styles?

ii.) What are the possible concerns / problems that will arise should the Project Manager does not have the desired leadership qualities?

iii.) What are your possible suggestions / recommendations to address those concerns / problems that you have highlighted above?

Project Team Motivation

As most of you may have found out in real life, hiring people and just giving work to them does not guarantee that they can perform the work up to your satisfaction. Employees generally need some form of motivation to push them to perform both individually as well as a team.

In your assignment, you will need to highlight various issues of motivation:

i.) What are the risks / dangers to the project completion and delivery of quality if the team members are not adequately motivated?

ii.) What are the reasons that project team members may not feel motivated during the life cycle of the project?

iii.) What approaches or strategies can be implemented to motivate the team members throughout the whole project? Remember that motivation can come in many form; money, satisfaction, recognition etc.

iv.) How can the team members be motivated to work as a single team rather than individually? In other words, how can 'synergy' be achieved in the project team under you?

*Students are advised to look for books on management on the topic of team motivation to get more ideas on this section.

Project Risk Management

In this section, students can write about the following issues:

i.) Risk Identification - What are the possible things that can go wrong during the planning and execution of this project? As I have mentioned earlier, use your WBS to identify the risks in each tasks that need to be carried out in this project.

For example, what possible risks are there in the construction of the depot? The risks may include:

- Depot layout or design may not suit intended use - Construction plans not approved or delayed by local authorities - Construction delayed by non-performing contractors / sub-contractors vendors - Construction delayed due to weather conditions

- Construction runs into cost-overruns and financing problem

As a guide, go through my notes on the various categories of risks e.g. market risk, technical risks, environmental risks, financial risks etc. Please take caution not all is relevant to your report, use your own judgement and knowledge to select and highlight the important ones.

ii.) Risk Evaluation / Analysis - Here, you evaluate the risks that have been identified above by giving a quantity (say, 1-10) on the likelihood of that risk happening as well as the impact of the risk to the success of your project. This is where you can map out your all your risks in a Risk Matrix diagram (optional).

iii.) Risk Response - In this last part, you will write on what do you recommend to handle each of the risks identified and quantified above. Remember in my lecture that you have four options for each risk i.e. mitigate, transfer, avoid and accept.

Back to the example in (i.), use of different option will yield different recommendations:

Mitigate - You may choose to employ an experienced engineer to oversee the whole job Transfer - You may choose to appoint a turnkey contractor for the construction

Avoid - You may choose to rent or buy a ready-made depot instead of constructing one Accept - Take no action but monitor the risk during the whole project life cycle

Each response option will have their pros and cons, costs and benefits; you may discuss about that if you want to make that extra effort in your assignment.

*Students must also remember that the topic of risk management is a broad management discipline by itself. Therefore, do not get too carried away and list down too many risks to address. Selected few is good enough to show that you have address this concern in your project plan development for this assignment.

Question from Your Fellow Student

Question
One of our fellow classmate managed to get the information on the Project Management Textbook, Field & Keller, 2007 from Christine in regards of our Task 1 assignment, as per the attachment.
As stated in the essential methodology that we should use the said method (AON) format to answer the question 1.
Please advise us if we should present the whole AON format in Q1 as it carries 8 marks for this question.
Your kind immediate attention and soonest reply to the above is highly appreciated.

Answer
There is no problem in presenting the whole AON format in Q1. Please go ahead.

Assignment : Case 2

Dear Students,

Here's a link to some extra information that may help you in your assignment Task 2...

http://pmstudent.com/joshs-interview-about-being-a-project-manager/

Make sure you put this webpage into your reference.

Assignment : Case 2

Project Control & Monitoring

Here in this section, you should be recommending to the management of Touprom on how to monitor and control the project to ensure that it will be implemented smoothly and the deliverables can be achieved.

The function of project monitoring is to provide updated information about the project during the implementation stage to the project stakeholders; while the function of the project control is to take actions to steer the project back to the project plan.

Note that in my notes, I have mentioned that project control is important to ensure that:

a.) Project tasks are implemented within the agreed scope

b.) Project is completed within the duration and budget

c.) Project is completed within the expected quality and/or performance requirements

Some of the key words associated with project monitoring & control are:

a.) Milestones

What are the milestones you will need to set up? As previously noted, milestones are incorporated into the overall project schedule to facilitate the control and monitoring of the project. Milestones are usually the major achievements within the project.

In the context of this assignment, milestones can include:

i.) Complete execution of the purchase or rental agreement for the land to site the depot

ii.) Completion of the engineering design of the physical depot

iii.) Handover of the physical depot by the contractor to the client (i.e. Touprom) upon the complete construction, testing and commissioning of the depot

iv.) Completion of the mobilisation of all rental equipment into the depot

b.) Progress reporting - What to report? How to report? Who to report to?

Progress reports are documents that the Project Manager needs to prepare regularly (daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly) to monitor and communicate the progress of the project to his/her Project Team as well as the client and other stakeholders.

In preparing the progress reports, team members will need to report to the PM on the progress of each of their areas of responsibilities. These information is then combined to produce the overall progress report.

Progress are usually measured as amount of work done and amount of budget spent. These two quantities are also compared with each other to ensure that the budget are spent appropriately.

Real progress of the project will also be measured against the scheduled completion time and cost to see whether the project is ahead of time, on-time or behind time and under-cost, within cost or over-cost.

If the project is behind time, actions must also be highlighted to catch up with the lost time. If the project is over-cost, preemptive measures must also be taken to prevent the project to run out of funds before completion.

Use of graphics such as bar charts is always useful to give a quick representation of the progress.

Question from Your Fellow Student

Question

Hi Mr. Tang
Good afternoon to you.

I would like to ask some info & opinion from Mr. Tang, about our Managing Project - Task 1.
We should use Mr.Tang 's teaching way or use the "Field and Keller" (that Task 1 instruction had mention) or both ways also can, to draw up the activity on the node diagram for Task 1 Question 2 & 3.

Sorry to ask this again because we hear some our classmate, they say that last time their ex-senior was follow Mr.Tang's way to do the activity on node diagram, and they failed this paper in the end.

I would like to apologize & i am not means here to call to account Mr. Tang's teaching way, but just would like to understand more & clearly, as some of us start to worry, as we already finish task 1 in early.

Thanks & best regards.

Reply

Having re-visited the text by Field & Keller and comparing with my lecture notes, I can say that the 'essential methodology' required in the assignment is similar as to what I have presented in the class. These include:

1.) The use the 'Activity-On-Node' or AON method;

2.) The use of forward pass & backward pass to determine all the timings (i.e. EST, LST, EFT, LFT);

3.) The requirement to enter all timings as DAYS, not as dates;

I think the main confusion lies in the way the Activity Box in my notes differ from the Activity Box given in the text.

As you can see from the two types of activity box, the information presented in the activity boxes are exactly the same (i.e. the activity name, duration, EST, LST, EFT, LFT and float).

The difference lies only in the arrangement of the information in each boxes . Moreover, what I call simply as 'float' in my notes are known as 'total float' in the text.

If students feel more comfortable in following the design of the activity box as in the text, you are encouraged to do so. It only involves a change of the design of the boxes, the information is the same. I will leave the choice to you. What is more important is to put in a legend in your diagram to explain what each information means in your boxes so that your answer is concise and clear.

Most of the students from previous batches were using diagrams with the activity boxes I presented in my notes; therefore it is very unlikely that only some failed just because of using activity box of different design from that in the text.

Last but not least, I have mentioned that in the study of Project Management, different books and texts tend to use different diagrams and words to illustrate the same things. As such, it is very easy for students to get themselves confused with the subject.

I hope that this will clarify this query. Please feel free to raise this up in our next lecture if more clarification is required.

Case 2 : Assignment Framework

Dear Students,

Please note that I have posted slides containing a proposed Assignment Framework for your reference. Refer to the right-top corner of the blog.

I will also add in extra materials in due time.

Good luck,
Tang