It is not unusual for organisations to be unable to resource projects according to the schedule drawn from the logical constraints of the network diagram. These projects are known as resource constrained project since the allocation of resources can not exceed a certain limit. How does resource level and specifically, the Parallel method, resolve this issue and what is the general impact on the schedule. Explain the relationship between post leveling schedule and the rolled-up (baseline) budget.

Every project boils down to money. If you had a bigger budget, you could probably get more people to do your project more quickly and deliver more. That’s why no project plan is complete until you come up with a budget. But no matter whether your project is big or small, and no matter how many resources and activities are in it, the process for figuring out the bottom line is always the same.

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Budget costs and how to use it to compare progress on a project with a project budget.

Project constraints are never welcome, particularly when staff resources are the source of the limitation. Resource constraints refer to the limitations on staffing, equipment and other resources that are necessary to complete a project. Examples of resource constraints include limited staff and equipment availability because of other ongoing projects in a company.  The negative effects of resource constraints can be detrimental to a project. It can cause project delays, rushed projects with elevated amounts of errors, high stress levels and even the loss of good employees. It is important to take a step back and understand, of all the current activities your resources are working on, which activities should be focused on.

Solving the resource scheduling problem for optimal solutions is extremely complex, particularly for large project networks with many different resource types. There are ways to allocate resources to activities to minimise project delay based on certain priority rules. The parallel method is one way minimise project disruption. In the parallel method resources are allocated on a period by period basis rather than each activity. In this method only those activities whose preceding activities have been completed will be considered. If two or more activities compete for the same resources, then allocation of resources is based on certain prescribed priority rules. Compared to the serial method, the parallel method has been the most widely used heuristic. The following priority rules, in the order presented, have been found to be the most effective in minimising project delay. Minimum slack smallest duration lowest activity identification number Regardless of the scheduling heuristic used, the primary impact of resource constrained scheduling is the loss of flexibility due to the reduction in slack. Furthermore, the reduction in slack also increases the number of critical or near-critical activities. The resource levelling is the technique in which start and finish dates are adjusted based on resource constraints with the goal of balancing demand for resources with the available supply. Project resources are rarely unlimited. In most cases, project managers have to compete for resources, and eventually compromise on one or more project elements in response to resource constraints. Assuming resource levelling is required, you will also need to identify your scheduling flexibility. This is the point at which the strategic and technical elements of resource levelling come together. 

Project planning resource levelling is the process of resolving these conflicts. It can also be used to balance the workload of primary resources over the course of the project[s], usually at the expense of one of the traditional triple constraints; time, cost and scope. In order to properly manage project resource gaps, you must get an early start, long before project work begins. This will give you a tremendous advantage, as you will be able to fully consider, vet and communicate all viable alternatives

What is Earned Value, how is it linked to Variance Analysis and how does this form the basis of project Monitoring and Control

As noted, EVM is a technique that project managers use to track the performance of their project against project baselines. Often the progress of a project is thought of simply as being ahead or behind schedule and over or under budget. However, what if you’re ahead of schedule, but costs are higher than your planned budget? Or, what if you’re behind schedule, but costs are lower than you first calculated?

This is where knowing the earned value helps. It can provide deeper information on your project. And when learning about earned value, it’s important to remember that there are three terms associated with it, which are each slightly different.

1. Earned Value Analysis (EVA): This project management technique is quantitative. It evaluates project performance by figuring out the likely results of the project. It does this by comparing the progress and budget of work planned to the actual costs.
2. Earned Value Management (EVM): This methodology measures project performance with an integrated schedule and budget, which is based on the project work breakdown structure (WBS).
3. Earned Valued Management System (EVMS): This is the collection of tools, templates, processes and procedures that an organization uses to do EVM.

Please click the following link to see a video explaining EVM

How does resource level and specifically, the Parallel method, resolve this issue and what is the general impact on the schedule. Explain the relationship between post leveling schedule and the rolled-up (baseline) budget.

A Project Plan is prepared, which is defined as a management summary document that describes the essentials of a project in terms of its objectives, justification and how the objectives are to be achieved. It describes how all of the major activities under each project management function are to be accomplished, including that of overall project control. The project plan will evolve through successive stages of the project life cycle. A Project Plan is developed once the Business Case and Project Charter have been defined.

Developing a good schedule for managing the execution of a project is paramount to good project management practice. The Critical Path Method of scheduling is currently the most popular technique employed by scheduling practitioners. Understanding how a schedule has been created, as well as the impacts of progress and disturbances,

The Critical Path Method

The Critical Path Method (CPM) is the backbone upon which the project execution plan is built. It provides a dynamic analysis of activity sequencing and progress reporting, the foundation for excellent progress and performance analysis, such as earned value management, as well as a tool for resource deployment and management.

The CPM is a relatively simple concept. It consists of linking the activities that make up the project execution in a logical, sequential manner such that the execution is both practical and generally as fast as possible. For example, "Pour Foundation" activity must follow after the "Excavate Foundation" activity. Barring some revolutionary new construction method, anything otherwise is just not practical. However, if the foundation is of a long physical nature, it may be possible to overlap the two activities by delaying the pouring some finite time behind the start of the excavation, rather than waiting for the completion of the total excavation before starting any pouring. The point of this is that the practicality of activity sequencing is limited only by the feasibility of the actual work.

The speed of execution limited by another factor: the availability of the required resources. By resources we mean the personnel, materials and equipment that is necessary to perform a particular activity. Resource assignment and levelling is the subject of the second part of this paper.

By tying all the activities into a logical, sequential network, the CPM calculation can then proceed to determine the earliest possible time activities can be accomplished and the latest possible time activities need to be accomplished in order to meet the project completion date. The primary restriction of any CPM is that the total project execution must fit between the start and finish dates of the project. As we will see later, the CPM also provides the means to fit a particular set of activities between some intermediate dates between the project start and finish.

Calculating the start of each activity is essential as that determines the latest finish for any predecessor activities. The backward pass applies these algorithms from right to left through the entire schedule network until all activities have a late finish and a late start date assigned.

The combined picture of the forward- and backward passes looks as shown in Exhibit 3. The dates in this illustration are ordinal dates to facilitate the review of the formulas. The early dates, which resulted from the forward pass, are shown on top of each activity bar and the late dates, which resulted from the backward pass, are shown below each bar.

Since no project required finish date was specified, the backward pass started the calculations from day 22 as the default project finish date. This date came from the forward pass calculation and is the last early finish date of all activities in the project.

A project manager, when you generate a budget when setting a baseline financial project plan, you can select any active budget financial plan type that's available for budget creation. However, some financial plan types (including the default financial plan type selected in the budget generation options of the project plan type) are unavailable for selection in the following circumstances:

·         If you already selected an approved cost or revenue budget financial plan type for creating a budget version, then no other approved budget financial plan types are available.

·         If you want to select a financial plan type with budgetary control enabled on it, then it is unavailable for selection in the following circumstances:

o    The project or template is not enabled for budgetary control.

o    The business unit is not enabled for budgetary control.

o    The project is a sponsored project, then only an award budget is expected to be enabled for budgetary controls.

o    A different budgetary control enabled financial plan type is already used.

To develop a preliminary network schedule, you first need to define the activities, sequence them in the right order, estimate the resources required, and estimate the time it will take to complete the tasks. The activity definition process is a further breakdown of the work package elements of the WBS. It documents the specific activities needed to fulfil the deliverables detailed in the WBS. These activities are not the deliverables themselves but the individual units of work that must be completed to accomplish the deliverables. Activity definition uses everything we already know about the project to divide the work into activities that can be estimated. Scheduling aims to predict the future, and it must consider many uncertainties and assumptions. A variety of inputs and tools are used in the scheduling process, all of which are designed to help you understand your resources, your constraints, and your risks. The result is a plan that links events in the best way to complete the project efficiently.

Once you have outlined the primary schedule, you need to review it to make sure that the timing for each activity is aligned with the necessary resources. Below are some commonly used tools to achieve this:

What if “scenario analysis – This method compares and measures the effects of different scenarios on a project. You use simulations to determine the impact of various adverse, or harmful, assumptions – such as resources not being available on time, or delays in other areas of the project. You can then measure and plan for the risks posed in these scenarios.

Resource levelling – Here, you rearrange the sequence of activities to address the possibility of unavailable resources and to make sure that excessive demand is not put on resources at any point in time. If funds are available only in limited quantities, then you change the timing of activities so that the most critical activities have enough resources.

Critical chain method – This also addresses resource availability. You plan activities using their latest possible start and finish dates. This adds extra time between events, which you can then use to manage work disruptions.

Risk multipliers – Risk is inevitable, so you need to prepare for its impact. Adding extra time to high-risk activities is one strategy. Another is to add a time multiplier to specific tasks or certain resources to offset overly optimistic time estimation.

A Schedule Network Analysis is a graphical representation of a schedule showing each sequenced activity and the time it takes to finish each one. It’s used to identify early and late start dates, as well as early and late finish dates, for the uncompleted portions of project schedule activities. This analysis also helps determine the Critical Path, What-if Analysis, and Schedule Compression. It’s usually represented in the form of a Gantt chart or PERT Chart.

Schedule Network Analysis and diagrams are extremely useful for projects in many ways and provide many benefits such as;

·         Activity sequencing

·         Project length

·         Completion date

·         Critical Path

·         Lead and Lag times

·         Graphical representation of the entire project

·         Possible slippage

·         Possible what-if analysis

·         Possible schedule crashing analysis

Drawing the project network places, the activities in the right sequence for computing start and finish times of activities. Activity time estimates are taken from the task times in the work package and added to the network. The below diagrams shows an example of activities and the time lines associated with these tasks and how there are predecessors to some of these tasks.

In projects, float or slack is the amount of time that a task in a project network can be delayed without causing a delay to: subsequent tasks ("free float") project completion date ("total float"). Slack helps project managers run projects efficiently without compromising quality and the network diagram outlines these tasks and predecessors.

Project management and risk

Projects typically involve many dynamic aspects, one of the most crucial aspects of project management is accurate project estimates. Estimation is an invaluable tool for anticipating and managing project uncertainties. Accurate project estimates help identify cost and schedule requirements with relative precision, and reduce the risk of running out of time, resources, and budget during a project. There are ways project managers can ensure their estimates are accurate which can lead to the project being a success instead of a failure.

The first step to estimating your project is to break down the actual work involved for your project. Although you may have a general idea of how much time the project overall will take, capturing scope based on estimating from the project level will likely result in wildly inaccurate estimates. Starting with estimating the effort at the task level will result in greater accuracy of the total project effort. Using a construction project as an example, you would assess the various components of the project. The amount of hours each phase will take, all the materials required, each subcontractor to perform the labour, and anything else that will be needed to complete the job. Then you can break down the project and consider the cost of each individual part. If we stay with the construction industry as an example, another way to ensure estimates are more accurate is to be aware of unit cost estimating guides. This can be a faster way of estimating cost but not always the most accurate. 

Estimating based on unit cost or extent of per square foot can be a bad choice for accurate estimating due to the many variables of a construction project. These guides should be used as Ball Park only. A more accurate way is to list all the items needed for the job. Identify each piece of assembly required to complete the job and attach a unit cost to them. The sum of all the unit costs will help you reach a more precise estimate.

The use of a master checklist can also help to make sure the project stays on track and is completed in its entirety. It can be very easy to forget things like planning permission, landscaping, landscaping etc. They is why the WBS structure and diagram is so effective. The use of a master checklist to make sure you don’t forget necessary steps and items. Providing detailed description of where you need expertise and more importantly where you don’t, can help projects manager’s cuts costs across the entire project. It’s quite easy to be detailed on the portions of the project where you have the most experience, but it’s your own grey areas that will come back and bite you with cost overruns. Being more meticulous onthe areas you aren’t familiar with help you in gain your knowledge for future projects. Contacting specific subcontractors or consultants to help out on areas that require another set of eyes can also be very useful. Specialty labour, or craftsmen, must include normal wages and benefits. Be sure to take all this into account when establishing their hourly rate when estimating the cost of labour for the project. Once you have the rate established, build out the additional members of the specialty labour force and determine an overall rate. 

Consider how many employees you will need to bring into this project. At the hourly rate, determine what it will cost for those workers. Construction projects can be very unpredictable. When you start the estimating process, you have to consider what could possibly go wrong during construction. Consider potential mishaps and factor them into the cost and timeline of the project. It is not easy to predict the future, but you can look back on old projects and try to find commonalities to determine what risks may take place. You can do this by looking at previous projects. Using this past knowledge as a guide when creating estimates for future projects can be valuable.

Understanding material and product prices can play a huge part when estimating construction projects. Material prices change, so paying close attention to factors that can affect pricing when estimating costs is a very worthwhile task. Factors such as:

• Is demand high for a specific material or product?
• Do you have specific delivery challenges?
• Is the product or material custom?
• Do you need the product or material faster than the manufacturer’s normal turnaround time?

It is also crucial to understand material availability and any potential scheduling delays that will have cost implications if you don't order the materials on time. Materials not arriving on time can have huge knock on effects for parts of the projects. If products will have a long lead time, then you should plan that accordingly during construction.

There are many different project estimation methods. Two common methods for project estimation are top-down and bottom-up. Using a high-level work breakdown structure and data from previous projects, you can add estimates for each project work item to determine the overall effort and cost. The top-down method lacks detailed analysis, which makes it best suited for a quick first-pass at a prospective project to assess its viability.

The bottom-up method uses a detailed work breakdown structure, and is best for projects you’re committed to. Each task is estimated individually, and then those estimates are rolled up to give the higher-level numbers. This process makes you think about what’s required in order to take a step back to see if the big picture still makes sense. You’ll receive more accurate results than the top-down method, but it’s also a greater investment of time.

Poor estimates are on the main contributing factors for under-performing or failed projects. Inadequate estimates are the single largest cause of projects that don’t deliver on their promises and it is a worsening trend, and has been for over a decade. These top 3 factors alone contributed to 53% of poor project performance. The top six factors contributed to 78% of poor project performance. (PWC Report on Insights and Trends: Current Portfolio, Programme, and Project Management Practices). One of the report’s most significant, and yet not surprising, findings is that poor estimation during the planning phase continues to be the largest contributor to project failures. Irelands new National Children’s Hospital and its cost overrun really backs up these findings from the PWC report.

WBS and Risk

The Project Management Institute defines a WBS as “A deliverable-oriented grouping of project elements that organizes and defines the total work scope of the project. Each descending level represents an increasingly detailed definition of the project work”

There are three reasons to use a WBS in your projects.  Firstly it, helps to more accurately and precisely define and categorise the scope of the total project. This is usually done by means of using a hierarchical tree structure. Each level of this structure breaks the project deliverables or objectives down to more specific and quantifiable chunks. The second reason for using a WBS in your projects is to help with assigning responsibilities, resource allocation, monitoring the project, and controlling the project. The WBS makes the deliverables more precise and concrete so that the project team knows exactly what has to be accomplished within each deliverable. This also allows for better estimating of cost, risk, and time because you can work from the smaller tasks back up to the level of the entire project. Finally, it allows you double check all the deliverables' specifics with the stakeholders and make sure there is nothing missing or overlapping.

For example please see below the WBS for a football tournament

In order to understand which areas of the project might require special attention, and whether there are any recurring risk themes, or concentrations of risk on a project, it would be helpful if there were a simple way of describing the structure of project risk exposure.

 Simple list of risk sources does not provide the richness of the WBS since it only presents a single level of organization. A better solution to the structuring problem for risk management would be to adopt the full hierarchical approach used in the WBS, with as many levels as are required to provide the necessary understanding of risk exposure to allow effective management. Such a hierarchical structure of risk sources should be known as a Risk Breakdown Structure (RBS). Following the pattern of the WBS definition above, the RBS is defined here as “A source-oriented grouping of project risks that organizes and defines the total risk exposure of the project. Each descending level represents an increasingly detailed definition of sources of risk to the project.” The RBS is therefore a hierarchical structure of potential risk sources. The value of the WBS lies in its ability to scope and define the work to be done on the project; similarly the RBS can be an invaluable aid to understanding the risks faced by the project. Just as the WBS forms the basis for many aspects of the project management process, so the RBS can be used to structure and guide the risk management process.

There are six stages of the project management process, we will now take a look at the second phase also known as the “definition phase”. After the project plan (stage one) has been approved, the project enters the second phase: the definition phase. In this phase, the requirements that are associated with a project result are specified as clearly as possible. This involves identifying the expectations that all of the involved parties have with regard to the project result. During this phase, a project plan and project scope may be put in writing, outlining the work to be performed.  According to the book project management fifth edition project scope should include the following stages.

•     Project deliverables
•   Project Milestone
• Technical Requirements
• Limits and exclusion
• Customer review

The project management team should prioritize the project, calculate a budget and schedule, and determine what resources are needed. The project definitions should be in sync with that of the client and end user requirements.

It is at this stage that the Project manager and its participants can use the scope of the project as a tool in order to measure the success of the project. It is very important that all parties that are involved in the project are able to collaborate during the definition phase, particularly the end users who will be using the project result. The client, who pays for the project, is indeed invited to collaborate on the requirements during the definition phase. Nonetheless, the project result benefits when its future users are also invited. As a point of departure, it is helpful to make a habit of organising meetings with all concerned parties during the definition phase of a project

This involves identifying the expectations of all parties involved with regard to the project result. It is important to identify the requirements as early in the process as possible. The Preconditions for the project, Functional & Operational requirements and Design limitations should be clearly defined in this phase.

Risk is associated with things that are unknown. More things are unknown at the beginning of a project, but risk must be considered in the initiation phase and weighed against the potential benefit of the project’s success in order to decide if the project should be chosen.

Poory defined project scope has been cause of 50% of all project failures according to the book written by Larson and Grey Project management 5th Edition. Scope creep can lead to risk when the project scope is not defined accurately. Project scope refers to alterations that have been made or introduced as the project progress. These can include things like newly defined costs or other add-ons. An example of project scope is what is currently happening with the new children’s Hospital and the increased costs.