Using TOC To Improve Project Management. ________________________________________ Most projects, whether big or small, are undertaken either to create a new structure, such as a plant, an airport, an Olympic stadium, a bridge, a new product, etc., or to modify an existing structure, such as a plant expansion, adding a new production line, expanding a highway, etc. In most cases, the late completion of the project, such as finishing the Olympic stadium two weeks after the opening of the Olympics, or having a new airports' opening delayed until after the elections, etc., generally carries with it some significant negative ramifications for the project owner. At the same time, there are many cases where the early completion of the project will provide the project owner with significant positive ramifications, such as the market share gained by preempting the competitions' launching of a new product, or the increase in sales achieved by bringing the plants productive capabilities on-line sooner, etc. Another important characteristic of most projects is that many of the resources performing the individual project tasks are sub-contracted resources, at least in terms of their relationship to the project manager. As sub-contracted resources, they are often committed to completing more than one project specific task during any given window of time. The issue of resource availability is often further complicated by the nature of the disturbances associated with most project specific tasks. As a result, most sub-contractors will only commit to completing a project specific task within a window of time and by a specific date, regardless of the fact, that the actual time required to complete the project specific task is generally much smaller than the allotted time window. Hence, the detail scheduling of the sub-contractors resources is generally something that most project managers have little or no direct control over. Lastly, most projects usually involve the investment/expenditure of one or more limited resources, such as money, peoples time, skills, equipment, etc. As a result, most people try to maximize the return on these investments/expenditures, thus making the overall lead time, from start to finish, the key factor in almost every project. As with most decisions involving the use of limited resources, there is the need to consider trade-offs. Trade-offs that often appear as a conflict between the availability of the limited resource, which is usually money, and the overall project lead time from start to finish. As long as the decisions involve trade-offs which cannot be quantified into a single measurement, that is without a Final Judge, then the determination of "best" will always remain somewhat less than objective.
Projects are widely used by many organizations and government institutions in the course of conducting their business. One of the reasons for this is because they have been proven to be effective in initiating change and translating strategic programs into daily activities. However, it has been established that most projects fail to deliver on time, budget, and customer specifications. In most cases, this failure is caused by over-optimism by the project management team. This over-optimism commonly referred to as optimism bias can simply be defined as overestimating the projects benefits and conversely underestimating its cost and duration time. Research have portrayed that this is often caused by failure to properly identify, understand, and manage effectively the risk associated with the project therefore putting its success at jeopardy(Mott McDonald, 2002). Fortunately, this biasness can be detected and minimized during the project gateway process.
According to this project there is no need for an early completion. There is also a risk of late completion because there are many subcontractors involved so if one or many fails to complete their jobs within the allocated time it could extent the project period. In management procurement the work is done by hiring experts.
The three factors of performance, schedule and cost are vital to project managers. Their interactions can lead to a number of consequences on the project plans (Ward & Peppard, 2002). Performance refers to the operational and support features of a system which allows it to successfully accomplish the set goals. The support features of such systems includes both the support elements responsible for system operation and the supportability aspects of the current design. Schedule refers to the series of things which are to be done based on a specific sequence and within a specific period of time. Cost refers to the ability of a system to achieve a program 's life-cycle objectives. As a result, it includes the impact of budget and affordability
Project Planning and development Lifecycle is one of the most critical and sensitive aspects of organization that can have direct impact on productivity, efficiency and reputation of the organizations. Therefore, in order to complete the project development in an effective and optimized manner, it is important that special focus is made on issues and factors that lead to failed or over-expensed projects. Therefore, one of the most common concerns of project managers is regarding the factors leading to project failures, costs higher that allocated, and wastage of resources. Considering the importance of Project Planning and development lifecycle, respective paper will describe that Often projects fail due to incapability of not planning and estimating the project requirements, specifications and costs in an effective and efficient manner that could lead to successful scheduling of the project.
A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product or service. They are goal oriented, have a definite start and finish time, must be done within cost, schedule and quality parameters. Projects involve the coordinated undertaking of interrelated activities (Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage). According to Tom Peters, “Projects, rather than repetitive tasks, are now the basis for most value-added in business”. Based on this, it is clear that projects are of utmost importance to businesses in both the service and the manufacturing industries.
When this technique is used, the project manager needs to maintain a project-level schedule reserve to compensate for the activities that will be
Crucial to the successful outcome of any major highway construction and reconstruction projects is the ability to accurately plan, predict and control the construction process. Budget control, resource allocation and consequential impacts are some of the important factors that a scheduler needs to keep in mind while planning a highway construction project. Today, highway constructors need sophisticated project management tools to achieve their project goals on time. Project scheduling has tremendously helped constructors building construction for the past 20 to 30 years. However, traditional scheduling techniques used by buildings contractors cannot be applied to highway construction as the activities involved in highway construction are fundamentally different than those typically found on a building project.
Risk management is a major success key of project management in business world. With major budget overruns in parallel with significant delays, Sydney Opera House is a real example of poor risk management. Risk management requires effective planning, budgeting, and scheduling. First of all, the highest risks should be identified and evaluated in order to find methods to reduce their impact and exposure. Then, factors that cause risk should be addressed while factors that only correlate with the negative impact but do not affect it may be omitted. At this stage, interrelation between various risks should be accounted for to spot the core factors that should be treated in order to ensure effectively and stability of the project's functioning.
Specialist contractors – generally known as subcontractors – perform the majority of the work on commercial construction projects. They face significant challenges in allocating their resources across multiple, concurrent projects (O’Brien and Fischer 2000). Despite their central nature to project performance, relatively little research has been performed to formally model their operations. Without such modeling, there exists little basis from which to measure or improve performance. This dissertation attempts to address the limited literature by providing a formal, information model for subcontractor resource management. There are three main contributions: First, addition to the general literature on subcontractor management as a precursor to formal modeling. Second, an information model for subcontractor resource management. This model is expressed in UML (the Unified Modeling Language) and implemented in code. Third, as part of the information model, an extension to the Process Connectors architecture (Siddiqui et al 2008) to add resource constraints to distributed schedule coordination. Model development and validation is performed through case studies with subcontractors and general contractors. Collectively, the contributions of this research provide a practical basis for describing and representing subcontractor resources that can improve practice as well as provide a foundation for future prescriptive research.
Project management is said to be completed within time when it completed within the “triple constraints”: cost, time and quality. And in a lot of causes, one them is sacrificed so as to meet the other two. Project managers prioritize which ones are the most important.
As per (Gido J, Clements J., 2015) “Project Selection involves evaluating potential projects, and then deciding which of these should move forward to implemented. The benefits and consequences, advantages and disadvantages, plusses and minuses of each project need to be considered and evaluated. They can be quantitative and qualitative, tangible and intangible”.
Time-phased project work is the basis for project cost control. Work package duration is used to develop the project network. Further, the time-phased budgets for work packages are timetabled to establish fiscal measures for each phase throughout the project. The time-phased budgets are to emulate the real cash needs of the budget, which will be used for project cost control. This information is useful to estimate cash outflows. The project manager's attention is on when the costs are to occur, when the budgeted cost is earned, and when the actual cost materializes. This information is made up to measure project schedule and cost variances (Gray & Larson, 2005). The following are typical types of costs found in a project:
...creased project value generation” and subsequently enhanced productivity. When time management is organized in a way to exploit the risk opportunities identified in the early project phase, increased productivity can result.
Although all of these project-scheduling techniques are very useful and present the entire data in a very presentable format for the project manager and other stakeholders, it is very critical that these be coupled with the other project management techniques to make it a successful
When planning a new project, how the project will be managed is one of the most important factors. The importance of a managers will determine the success of the project. The success of the project will be determined by how well it is managed. Project management is referred to as the discipline that entails the processes of carefully planning, organizing, controlling, and motivating the organization resources so as to foster and facilitate the achievement of specific established and desired goals and meet the specific criteria of success required in the organization (Larson, 2014). Over the course of this paper I will be discussing and analyzing the importance of project management.