Unit 42 Business Project Management Assignment

Unit 42 Business Project Management Assignment

Project Summary

Project summary for the present project of constructing the college building can be given by imparting information such as name of the project, start date, finish date, budget information, project sponsor, project size & capacity, location of the project and description of the project. A project summary sheet is given by table 1 as appendix.

Project scope

1. Description of the business need: Business need in the present context has aroused due to earning opportunity& lack of educational facilities by looking into the global education industry. Magnitude of the need is to develop college for the management students. In case this college gets established than students from the local community would be able to get proper education along with overseas students looking for the specific course in management stream.
2. Project opportunity statement:Opportunity for the present project is in terms of the specific course offered for the students which are not being offered by other universities in London. In addition to this strategic location of the project would benefit the college as students in nearby area do not have college which can cater to their needs.
3. Project goal:Goal of present project is twofold wherein this project would help the management team of college to develop an earning opportunity while at the same time this project would provide overseas students a good destination for pursuing their management courses in London (Bedworth and Bailey, 1982).
4. Project objectives:Objectives of the present project can be given as under:

• To develop the college infrastructure
• To develop entire structure within timeframe of 1 year and with desired cost
• To develop structure as per guideline for the educational bodies
• To provide students with opportunity to pursue particular management course

Hard objectives of the present project would be related with the time, cost and operational objectives such as developing structure within 1 year and given cost. Soft objectives are related with the how objectives would be attained and includes project schedule development in order to monitor the progress.

1. Benefits of project:Present project would be beneficial in terms of starting new educational services for the students of London and overseas students looking for the management courses in order to accomplish their study (Bjarne, 2007).
2. Critical success factor of the project:Critical success factors of the present project can be given as under:

• Developing feasibility of the project
• Identification of the sponsors for the project
• Acceptance for the project charter by the project sponsor
• Alignment of the project with the strategic plan

1. Project deliverables:Project deliverables would include milestones which are approved by the project sponsor in order to move to the next stage. Project deliverables are divided into three parts which are phase deliverables, process deliverables and task deliverables.
2. Project critical assumptions:There would be set of assumptions which are made in the project in terms of the capabilities for the management team, process adopted for the current project and benchmarking in order to accomplish the project.
3. Project constraints:There are mainly three constraints in the project management which are time, cost and human resource. Time is the major factor and limited time is given in which entire college infrastructure need to be developed and present project need to be accomplished within 1 year of time span (Christofides et al, 2005). Similarly, cost is an important limiting factor for the project and total cost of 2.5 million pound need to be invested for the development of infrastructure. Skilled human resource required for the project would be another major constraint which would limit the project.
4. Characteristics:Project undertaken in the present context would require high degree of efficiency from the project manager and project sponsor undertaking the project. This project would demand engagement from the top management team in the organization behavior so that coordinated efforts can be developed in order to achieve the project.
5. Stakeholders:Stakeholders of the project are individuals having vast interest in the project and can be of two types i.e. internal and external stakeholders. Internal stakeholders would include employees, management team and shareholders. External project stakeholders would include education governing bodies, students across the globe and other college in vicinity offering similar courses (Valls et al, 2002).
6. Kick off meetings:Meetings would be started from the first week and below table gives the meeting details

Project planning stage

1. Integration management:Integration management in the project management would include the six key areas such as development of project charter, developing project management plan, direct and managing the project execution, monitoring & control of the project, performing integrated change control and closing the project. This knowledge area would be related to the defining the work undertaken in a project and combining the project with appropriate processes. Integration management would also manage the issues and changes required for a particular project and develop the re-planning in case it is required. Integration management tool would include two tools i.e. earned value management tool and usage of the tool such as Microsoft project.
2. WBS:Work breakdown structure is structure developed in order to accomplish the project by dividing entire project under small tasks. These tasks would be divided so that completion of the project is based on these tasks and stakeholders would focus on these tasks for simple project completion. This would also help in analysing entire project requirements as breaking the work into simpler units would be helpful to understand develop capabilities and skill set of the project (Tseng et al, 2011).
3. Time management:Time management plan for the project would include estimating the task schedule, determination of the project schedule and project completion date for the project. Time management plan developed for the project would be helpful in order to monitor and control the project schedule. This project time management plan would be closely related to the cost plan for the project. Activity resource and time plan would be developed in advance. There would be six processes which would be included in the time management plan of a project and these processes are defining activities, sequencing activities, estimating activity resource, estimation for the activity duration, development of the schedule and controlling the schedule. Each activity would be defined in order to estimate the time required for the completion of particular activity. Sequencing need to be done so as to efficiently manage the entire activity and this would help in estimating the overall time required for the completion of the project. Estimating the resource and cost for the project would help in order to develop the project schedule and development of project schedule would help in order to control the project.
4. Cost management:Cost management area would also be similar to the time management plan. Cost management plan for the project would include the detailed budget which would be spent on the project activities so that each work activity has sufficient budget. Cost management would be helpful in order to understand the financial viability of the project and doing cost benefit analysis of the project. There would be three processes under cost management and these are estimation of cost, determination of budget and controlling the cost for the project. In order to optimize the process and determine options in cost management there would be two techniques which are life cycle costing and value engineering.

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Project execution stage

Project execution stage would be an important step in overall success of the project and it would mainly address five key areas which are quality management, human resource management, communication management, risk management and procurement management.

1. Quality management:Project quality management would cover mainly two areas which are creating the product/service of the acceptable quality and ensuring the overall quality for the project undertaken. There would be mainly three processes which are included under quality management and these are plan quality, perform quality control and perform quality assurance (Kolisch, 2006). Plan for the quality would be developed by looking into the requirements of the project against the benchmark quality of the project. Quality assurance in a project would include audit for the quality and this would include quality requirements with the quality measurement in a project. Monitoring would be done for the quality plan or efforts done in a particular project and this would include the project deliverables and to include the results of the project management plan i.e. how particular project is performing against the schedule and budget of the project.
2. Human resource management:Human resource management area in the project would be related with the management of people for the project. This project management area would be related with the acquisition of the team, development of the overall team performance and managing the performance of the team through tools such as performance appraisal, leading & coaching and resolving resource issues in a project. There would be mainly four process areas included in the human resource management plan and these are develop human resource plan, acquiring the project team, development of the project team and managing the project team.
3. Communication management:Communication does not only include the project stakeholders but also would include the information such as meeting management, risk action and project plan etc. This information related with the project need to be shared with the internal as well as external stakeholders of the project by development of effective communication plan. Communication plan developed in the organizational context would include documentation of all these processes and these documents need to be updated and reviewed. There are five processes included in this knowledge area and these are identification of the stakeholders, planning the communication, distribution of the information, management of the stakeholder’s expectations and reporting the performance etc. Stakeholder identification is important in order to understand the importance of communication and type of communication plan required in a particular project. Plan for communication would be developed so as to send effective message to the stakeholders of the project. Information is distributed in order to meet the stakeholder need and performance of the project would be reported through communication plan.       
4. Procurement management:Most of the projects are working under the customer supplier environment and project teams are working on behalf of the customers. Suppliers in the project are responsible for project deliverables or products. There can be both internal as well as external suppliers. Project procurement is carried out in order to acquire the products or services required in the project. Project procurement management activities would include change control and contract management etc. There would be mainly four processes included in the procurement management which are plan procurements, conducting procurements, administering procurements and closing procurements. Planning is important in order to ensure that required goods and services can be procured within given budget and time schedule (Curlee, 2011). Conducting procurement would require taking quotation from the vendor and administration of the procurements. Finally, procurement management would include closing the procurement by accepting the required goods and services in the project.
5. Risk management:Risk management in the project would include both threats and opportunities for the particular project. Opportunity should also be considered as the risk for the organization because in similar to the threat it also includes high degree of threat. Risk management area for the project would include six key processes in order to accomplish the risk assessment in a given project and these are plan risk management, identify risk, performing qualitative risk analysis, performing quantitative risk analysis, planning risk response and monitoring and control for the risk areas.

Monitoring and controlling stage

Monitoring and control for the project would be done with the help of two important tools developed in the project which are time schedule and budget developed. Time schedule developed through Gantt chart would be helpful in order to monitoring the estimated and actual time required for particular task (Kelley, 2013). This would help in implementing the correction actions so that overall project is as per the constraints defined in the project. Similarly, budget allocated for the project would be referred in order to monitor the actual cost spent in the project so that estimated and actual costs for the projects are same. Project review would be done on periodic basis in order to assess the progress of project and resources implemented in the project.

Reflective statement

Reflective statement for the project shows the reflection on the experience, learning, outcomes and success factors in a project so that in future benefits can be gained based on the prior experience. Reflective statement for the project would investigate regarding experience of the project, stakeholders involved in the project and action which took place during the project. For example in present context of college infrastructure development learning event was to develop project plan for this project and this project involves project sponsor, project manager, employees, government department and other colleges in it. The major issues emerged in the present project plan was restriction on the project resources and human resource so as to develop and execute proper plan. From the present project management document major learning is in terms of the practice experience over the project management aspects (David and Roland, 2006).

Present project also allows development of short term and long term goals which would be accomplished. Short term goal for the present project can be considered in terms of the development of particular building or installation of information system infrastructure. Long term goal can be considered as the start-up of college, getting clearance from the concerned authorities and covering other aspects. New insights have been gained through present project management plan wherein learning in terms of actual plan implementation and management under constrained resources. It has been observed that the project plan implemented in present context is based on the estimated time and budget and it is important that periodic review should be conducted for monitoring the progress of project with time and cost spent in the project.

During the project conduct it was important to build project planning in initial stage and develop goals with time duration. This would help in order to understand clearly on the project executed so that every stakeholder is aware of the roles and responsibilities which need to be fulfilled for successful project completion. Further project sponsor and project managers should take complete responsibility for the project and periodic meetings need to be carried out so that issues pertaining to the project team can be discussed and sorted out without wasting time on the project execution (Cattani et al, 2011).

In the current project plan estimations provided at the initial stage of project were not authenticated and these were just estimations without checking the validity of these project estimates. At the time of real project execution it was found that the budgeting parameter are not up to the mark and overall cost of the project is much higher as compared to the estimated cost of project. This leads to make corrective actions and get approval for the higher budget which is not desirable by the project stakeholders and may involve conflict. It is important to make estimates as per real market situation so that there are no corrections required on later stage.

It is important to take future learning from the current project so that at the time of execution of next project these learning can be kept in mind for efficient project execution. From the current project it has been learned that project management strategies would involve planning as an important part. Assessment of project viability is important to ensure that project undertaken in economically and technically viable. This viability assessment is important in order to ensure that project execution can be started and there are no major issues in the project undertaken.

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Recommendations

Below are the key recommendations in order to accomplish captioned project:

• Project planning is an important step for the project completion hence while planning for the project it is important to check the viability of the planning made in terms of the time and budget for the project
• Project stakeholders should be well aware of the project objectives and their roles should be clearly explained to them (Jörg et al, 2003)
• Senior management team should be involved in the project execution so that project outcome monitoring can be done properly
• Risk identification and categorization of various risk items is important in order to mitigate the risk contained in the project
• Project monitoring is an important step and timely review should be done for the project so that success can be attained in the project.

References

Becker, J. Kugeler, M. & Rosemann, M. (2003). Process management: a guide for the design of business processes. ISBN 978-3-540-43499-3. p.27.
Bedworth. D.D. and J.E. Bailey, (1982). Imegrated Production Control Systems - Management, Analysis, Design. Wiley, New York.
Bjarne K. (2007). Project Management –. Theory and practice. Nyt Teknisk Forlag. ISBN 87-571-2603-8. p.59.