Question

Describe some of the things a management team can do to balance resources, time, and cost constraints in a multiple project environment. What issues and concerns should a project manager consider when trying to balance these constraints? Having thought through this, at the first milestone for a current project you are managing, the customer complains that the deliverable is incomplete. Explain how you would address this

Answer 1

Project management may seem to be a very simple and convenient job to do but in real this is one o the most difficult jobs to handle because there are various aspects that a manager needs to take care of and manage. The most important aspect I believe would be balancing the resources, time and the cost allocated because based on such factors, the success of the organization depends to a great extent. While balancing such constraints the project manager should always maintain an amount of buffer in each aspect like the resources, time and budget. The buffer is required to be maintained in case of an issue or an incident that may consume more, for example a resource may have to take emergency long leaves due to some emergency and therefore in this case there needs to be a back up of the resource to handle the situation, same for time and budget as well.

If such aspects are maintained, then this is like the ideal situation for the organization, where they have proper balance of the resources and activities regarding the project. In case of a client feedback regarding an incomplete deliverable it should be taken up at priority and reach to the root cause of the problem, ideally after each and every implementation the organization needs to have a buffer period for which they will be supporting the project in case of any issues and in such a case it should be monitored right away and reported to the development team who needs o fix the same. The quality and assurance team will look at the enhancement and conduct functional and regression testing of the same and ensure better quality based on the requirement of the client. In order to make the relationship with the client better, the organization can even provide an extra add on facility due to the miss.