Question

W4A1

Project Planning Tools and Controlling

Taking a step back we know the success of the project depends on the amount of attention given to resource planning. Project budgets and schedules are managed off the careful planning of the resources required to complete the project. One way to assure accuracy of the estimate for resources is to ask the team to figure out the hours.

Respond to one of the following bullet points:

-How should budgeting, scheduling, and resource loading or leveling be most logically accomplished in terms of their chronological order? How would resource-constrained scheduling help, hinder, or change your recommendations?

-What are some potential problems with the top-down and bottom-up budgeting processes? What are some ways of dealing with these potential problems? In preparing a budget, what indirect costs should be considered?

-What characteristic(s) of the critical path times makes them critical? What two factors are compared by Gantt charting? How does the Gantt chart differ in purpose from the project master schedule?

-Contrast total slack and free slack. What is the average resource load factor? How is it used to determine project completion times? What are two methods for addressing the constrained resource allocation problem?

PS: Please respond in a very thorough manner AND be sure that the answer is not just copy and pasted from a chegg post that has already been answered and used. Thank you.

Answer 1

Business approaches can be divided into two parts which I can use in this specific organisation for properly managing the promotional budget for communication.

Top down approaches

Bottom up approaches

Top down approaches

In this approach budget creation comes from upper management and flows towards the lower level. The budget is followed from the higher management and later it is drop down to the lower management and budget is a lot it into the organisation. While creating the top down budget one should always keep in mind about the returns or investment.

Advantages of top down approaches

Management can take full control of the budget allocations any time required. It is a very streamline type of budget approaching which ensures a company to stay on a streamlined financial track. As everything it decided by the top management of the company in the budget management has skills in it and provides a better return as compared to other budget management strategies.

Disadvantages of top down approach

This type of approach creates the feeling of unfunded mandate in the lower employees. This specific strategy also creates a feeling of frustration in the employees. This also introduces a new ideology in employees mine that the management doesn't know how to spread out budget evenly into the organisation.

Bottom up approaches

Bottom up approach can be defined when the budget is distributed evenly from the lowest level to the higher level.

Some advantages of bottom up approach is as follows

It is basically based on the needs of the lower level employees which directly develops and defective promotion. It creates a sense of teamwork as well as cohesiveness. Cohesiveness and teamwork are one of the most important factors of business success. By having implementation of the lowest level employees this specific approach develops a more effective as well as efficient system to determine better budget management. This type of budget approach also offers better budget management by dividing the budget evenly among all the levels of the management system.

Some disadvantages of bottom up approach are as follow

Higher management can feel a direct loss of overall financial controlling in the management system. In this type of approach the higher management employees also think that lower management employees decide their budget which creates a feeling of inferiority. It increases the overall load on the lower level employees which can result in reduced efficiency of the system.

I would be integrating the Integrated Marketing Communication into this specific approach by implementing integrating all the promotional tools so that they can work in harmony to produce more benefits for the organisation as well as improve the overall efficiency towards the specific job. For improving the overall communication event, budget should be evenly divided into all the promotional parts of the management plan call to communication budget.