Question

What is a project? What is the difference between Projects and Operations?

What is project management?

What are the characteristics of effective project managers?

What is involved in project scope management?

Why is good scope management so important on information technology projects?

Many projects suffer from scope creep. How can it be avoided?

Why is activity definition the first process involved in project time management?

How do you control changes to project schedules?

What role does the WBS play in time management?

“Time is money”. In what ways are time management and cost management connected and in what ways do they differ?

Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is an umbrella activity that relates to both assuring the quality of work packages, and improving the process. Why is this important?

Give an example of where Quality becomes more important than any other element of Project Management.

Risk identification precedes other risk management processes. There are many techniques for identifying potential risks. Name 3 techniques for risk identification and discuss their usefulness.

Describe the Herzeberg and the Mazlow approaches to individual and team development. What might members of a team experience in these changes? Discuss these model’s validity in terms of your experience in team work.

Who are the stakeholders in a project? Why do they need to be managed and how can this be achieved?

What kind of stakeholders are hostile towards projects? How can they be managed?

Does Agile suit long term projects? Why or Why not?

Describe how Agile works with / inside / alongside Traditional PM.

What is a Code of Ethics, how is it developed, and who benefits from it?

The ACS Code of Ethics specifies 6 values and ideals and goes on to elaborate how a member must incorporate these into their professional behaviour. What are these 6 values and ideals?

Answer 1

1. Project- Project is anything that is carried out individually or in a group collaboratively that might involve planning,research and design (done by project team) to achieve a particular result.In computer science a project can be a set of programs ,configuration definitions and data related to that program.

Difference in Project and Operations.

A project is a undertaken to provide a unique output that can be a product,service or a specific result. Project are mainly temporary that are undertaken and completed within a specified time period.

Operations are permanent and ongoing and they produce repetitive output .examples of operations in an organization can be production, accounting,etc.Operations are required to maintain the system.

A project has a fixed budget and time frame and has to be completed within that constraint while operations are ongoing and permanent with only constraint of making a profit for the organization.

A project gets finished when the result is achieved while operational work never gets finished and is always ongoing.

A project might have more risk involved as they are carried out for the first time while there is less chance of risk in operations as they get repeated many times.

Project management is used to manage a project with project managers while business process management is required by operations.

2.Project Management- Project management includes 5 phases which are :

Conception and initiation- In this phase the project is conceptualized and initiated.

Planning-In planning phase the scope and budget is decided along with the work assignment to different teams responsible for the project.Risk management for any risk that might occur is also planned and a communication plan is created.

Execution- The execution phase is where the project is developed and completed.It consists of development updates , performance reports and status of the project.In the phase the teams are assigned resources and start working on the project and provide timely update of the development and status of the project.

Project performance/Monitoring- In this phase the project progress and the performance is measured as to check whether it is as per the project management plan.Effort and cost is tracked to see if everything is going according to the budget allocated.Project performance is done to check the changes in the project and the amount and type of issues that occur and how fast they are resolved.

Project Closure- The last phase of Project management is the project closure and it indicates the completion of the project.In this phase the contractual workers hired to meet the requirement for the completion of the project are terminated and valuable team members who contributed more than the others are also recognized.A final project budget and report is created and all the documents and deliverables of the project are collected and stored in one place.

3.Characteristic of Effective project managers- A project manager can be considered as effective only if he/she has:

a.Good communication skill- only with good communication skill can he/she can explain the project goals as well as assign tasks and resources to team members and provide feedback.

b.leadership skills- Having the ability to motivate the team and lead them in the correct way to achieve the maximum performance to reach the goal.

c.Decision making skills- There will be plenty of times a decisions will be required to be made in order to move forward with the project and good decision making skills will prove to be a great asset for the project manager during those times.

d. Technical Knowledge/Expertise- Good technical knowledge is required to understand the issues that occur related to technical aspect then only the project manager will be able to help in providing a solution.

e.Visionary - A good project manager must be visionary as to lead the people in the right direction as well as adapt to any changes that occur.

f.Team building-A project manager must have Team building skills by giving the right member the right resources to bring out the full potential.

g.Empathy- A effective project manager must value the people and be grateful for the help and must also understands the need of the people working on the project.

h. Competence-A effective project manager should be someone who knows what he is required to do and how to do it as well as be able to take care of any issue that might occur.

i.Negotiation skill- A effective project manager must have good negotiation skill to settle any conflict that might occur to maintain peace and harmony among the project team.

Only with the presence of above attributes a Project manager can be considered as effective.

4. Project Scope Management- It is the process to ensure that the project has all the required details in order to achieve the required project objective.It helps in specifying what needs to be done (inside the scope) and what is not required to be done (outside the scope) of the project.with its help only the required amount of work can be assigned for the project completion.

The following are involved in project scope management:

a. Planning- In this phase, input is taken from all the stakeholders.Together with the stakeholders it is decided and documented on how to define ,manage and validate the scope of the project.The plan also includes how the issues that might arise throughout the project duration can be handled.

b.Requirement gathering- This process tells about the requirements of the stakeholders from the project and how you are going to meet the expectation.A requirement document is created documenting all that is required from the project.Requirement can be gathered by methods like interviews,surveys,etc.

c.Scope definition- In the phase the the scope is clearly defined as to what is within the scope and what is not in a project scope statement. If someone is assigned a task outside the scope,he can refer to the document and explain why he can not complete that task at that moment.This document can help the team member by letting them know what they need to do and what is not needed to be done in the project.