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.
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