Chapter 1 Modern Project Management

hi everyone this is Professor Jurgens Kowal at San Jacinto College welcome to project management the code for the course is BMG T - 1309 and in this lecture today we will discuss chapter 1 of your textbook modern project management so today what I want to cover is just some housekeeping for the term and getting started in project management and then we'll talk about what's in Chapter 1 will define what is a project we'll compare a project to routine work that we do we'll talk about the project lifecycle the challenges of project management and that project management is really a balance between art and science and then finally we'll talk a little bit about your homework assignments but please check blackboard and the calendar for specific due dates as well as the course information and chapter information folders on blackboard so some housekeeping for the term you will need to print and read the syllabus which is posted on blackboard under a folder called syllabus and calendar your first assignment is to acknowledge the syllabus by email so please send me an email my email address is found in in blackboard to acknowledge that you've you've read the syllabus and that's going to be worth 5 points for your assignment great and we'll talk more about how grades are the different categories of grades a little bit later on that assignment is typically due the first Wednesday of the term for 16 week term or for a 10 week term but again please check the due dates on blackboard please only submit your homework assignments through blackboard assignments are not accepted late because we do have a lot to cover you'll notice that the textbook is a pretty big textbook we have a lot to cover this term please do not submit your assignments by email and less you are instructed by me specifically to do so and then secondly please do not submit your homework in the comments box in blackboard it cannot be graded correctly what happens is a comments box will truncate your assignment so I cannot see the entire assignment and then it does really weird things with formatting so it will be distorted so I cannot grade your homework if you submitted in the in the comments box so please only submit your homework as indicated in the blackboard submission box and finally you'll want to check blackboard for new announcements and course material frequently typically new course material is released on a Friday and your homework will be due on a Friday however for hybrid courses where we meet face-to-face these due dates may change in the introduction of new course material may also be on a different day of the week in addition to accommodate test schedules or exam schedules as well as holidays during the term homework may be due on different days of the week so don't it's typically Friday's but please check blackboard for announcements otherwise so online assignments are typically opened on Friday and due on Fridays hybrid course assignments will be tied to the day that we meet on campus your assignment will will be your grades will be based on three different categories one is the assignment grade and this will include things like class participation discussion boards your weekly homework assignment practice quizzes etc and that will be worth 15% of your grade the big part of your grade is based on your project each of you will select an individual project and you'll need to submit your project to me for approval by Wednesday the first Wednesday of the term as well and that individual project will be the bulk of your grade at 40% so it's very difficult to do poorly in the project grade because this is your project it'll be a project that you select that you're familiar with either from work or home or volunteer work and we'll build that project plan throughout the course of this term there are some examples posted on blackboard and we will discuss very examples as we go through the term as well your exams are also a very large percentage of your grade 45% will have three different exams you can check the exam schedule under the course information folder on blackboard for the exact weeks or days that our exams will be held for fully online classes we will have a one week time period in which to conduct a one to one and a half hour exam for hybrid courses we'll take exams in person during one of the course sessions on campus the grading rubric I think is is common to all classes 90% above is an a 80 to 89 percent is a B 70 to 79 percent a C 60 to 69 percent is a D and below 60% would be a failing grade I'm sure you guys are going to do really well because I think you're going to enjoy building the project and understanding the depth of planning that we go into to create a successful project so remember your project grade is a big chunk of the grade at 40% but we'll build that project plan week by week bit by bit so it's not too overwhelming but we will mostly do a lot of that work in maybe the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the term and then then we'll do some some lighter activities around the project at the end of the term again you can check the course information folder for our proposed schedule on either 16 week term or the ten week term okay so let's dive in to chapter one and start talking about project management in this term we will learn what is a project we'll talk about the phases and process groups and project management of course we're going to talk about how to prepare a project management plan again that's 40% of your grade but I think you'll find that very interesting some very important elements of project management are preparing the project schedule and evaluating the critical path so those might sound like strange words right now the critical path but we will talk about that in Chapter four in particular and it will be it'll it'll come to light with some calculations that we do on our schedule and I think you'll find that you'll recognize the concept of a critical path you may not recognize all the tools that we use we'll also talk about how to create a project budget project risks and then closing the project when it's all completed and finished we'll talk to that's called closing and we'll talk about how a project ends and again we'll talk about each of these items with our weekly homework the project and the tests that we cover and you can see some references to the course learning objectives in each of the chapters so let's get into chapter 1 and this will help support learning objective B which is to demonstrate project plan development and execute so what is a project a project is a temporary endeavor designed to create a unique product service or result typically that means that we have a given start date we know when the project starts and we have an end date we know when the project ends in addition a project normally requires a cross-functional team to do the work of the project we often in our conversation say oh I have a project to paint the dining room that is not really a project if we're doing it all by ourselves projects require that cross-functional team it requires interaction of different parties to accomplish the work of that project a very key element and this is something you're going to work on in your chapter 1 week 1 homework is talking about project outcomes they have to be measurable to determine successful completion of the project so I like to use the analogy of New Year's resolutions a lot of us make New Year's resolutions that oh I'm going to be healthier this year and that's fine but what is healthier really means if we set ourselves up instead to say I'm going to lose 10 pounds this year and I'm going to lose that 10 pounds by going to the gym three days a week and I'm going to be accountable by putting that one hour Jim on Monday Wednesday and Friday with a trainer then then were more likely to meet those successful outcomes the same is very true of a project we cannot just do a project to say oh I'm going to build a house you have to be very specific that the house will be a one-story two thousand square foot home with three bedrooms two bathrooms and a formal dining room so those those project outcomes have to be measurable in numbers in order for the project to be completed successfully and as a project manager you're going to be monitoring those numbers throughout the completion of the project to make sure that your customer or client is happy with those results because the customer or client is ultimately who judges if the project objective has been successfully completed normally performance of a project will be measured by on-time delivery or schedule the cost or budget and then quality measures of the project because even if you say I wanted a 2,000 square foot one-story home if it's not built of good construction its built of twigs and and the wolf can blow down the the Three Little Pigs house built of twigs that would not be a quality product and so your your customer client would not be happy one thing to consider is that there all of these definitions of a project are very different from what we consider as routine work about routine work versus project work routine work for a student might be taking class notes during during a lecture like this or during a face-to-face classroom doing regular bookkeeping is a routine repetitive work responding to supply chain or purchasing requests practicing the piano I know when I was growing up every day when I came home from school my mom would give me a cookie and a glass of milk and then I had to go practice the piano for certain amount of time and I had other chores to set the table for dinner and to wash the dishes after dinner those kind of chores are considered routine repetitive work if that helps you to clarify the difference between routine work and project work manufacturing of goods and services are routine work anything that you're doing in I worked at a department store while I was going to college and we had to always dust oh that was a horrible chore but we had to dust the racks and put up new signs every week for what was on sale and the price of different items so that type of thing is routine work comparatively a project again has a definite start and end date it involves cross-functional resources or different team members from different divisions and create something unique as a product of that project so writing a term paper would be a project because you're going to involve the librarian for example and you may be working with your classmates to create that term paper as well it has a distinctive start date and a distinctive completion date when you turn the paper in to your professor setting up a new sales kiosk for a meeting or setting up anything new is typically a project developing a new information system for the procurement folks writing a whole new piece of music would be a project or writing a book would be a project designing the next generation cell phone or iPod and that's a pretty big iPod that's 2 by 4 inches that one that's a that's an example of project work designing a new product or designing a new service and creating an RFID tag for different retail objects or things an rfid tag that goes on a pallet of goods that goes to Walmart those would all be considered project work so as you're considering your assignment for week 1 and what we're you're going to cover throughout this term please keep in mind the differences between routine work and project work some projects that are typical for students to turn in are things are working on at work for example sometimes you might be working in a chemical lab as a technician and so you're installing new equipment you might work in the IT department in you're installing new software you might have a project in construction you might have a home-improvement project like upgrading your bathroom or remodeling your kitchen those are all good examples of project work you might be planning a fun run or a charity golf tournament all of those things would meet the definition of a project so please consider the differences between routine work and project work as you submit your suggested project by the first Wednesday of the term you can also see table 1.4 in your textbook for some for these definitions of routine work and project work there are specific constraints on a project remember we talked about the performance of a project is typically measured by the quality of the work the on-time delivery and and cost of the project we call that the triple constraint the triple constraint balances the scope of work the time to complete the project work in the cost of that work so you should expect to see the definition of triple constraint on exams in the future but this is a really important element of projects because you cannot complete a project accurately unless you pay attention and balance these elements of the scope of work the schedule in the budget we also have other constraints that come into play in project management of course we also have quality as we discussed earlier there are limits on how much we can do on a project based on our human resources and our equipment resources as well as time as a resource that we have available to the project and we have to also balance risk in a project there are different levels of risk tolerance within different organizations so many of the oil companies are very risk-averse meaning they want to have everything planned very well in advance and have very little chance of something going wrong that would be risk-averse a company more like Google or 3m might be more risk tolerant risk tolerant means that you're seeking risk you're willing to take a chance to find out if something works and you may have a loss because it does not work but you're okay with that the company's management structures okay that sometimes things don't work because when something a little more risky does work it can have a huge payback so there's risk tolerant risk-averse and risk neutral organizations and we'll talk a lot more about risk when we talk about chapter 7 later this term there are a lot of different roles in project management the sponsor is a key person in project management this is the party that funds a project this may be if you're working on an internal project say to roll out new software to all of the company's employees on their computers the sponsor for that might be the IT department they're funding the the new software project you may also be working on a project for a client meaning that you're building a house for some customer and in that case the person who's going to own the house and live in it will be funding the project so the sponsor is who funds the project and you may have both a project sponsor and a client sponsor meaning that if you are building a house for somebody as a general contractor ultimately the person who's going to live in that house is paying for it there the client sponsor but you also have to as a general contractor manage the project internally and keep track of the funds and that would be the internal project sponsor stakeholders and please note the spelling of this stakeholders are anybody who basically has an interest in the project so this is the proverbial you're putting a stake in the ground and that's a stake a stick not a stake sta K that would just attract a lot of stray dogs I think so this day called there's anybody with an a vested interest in the project and a stakeholder may be positive or negatively interested in the project so many of you attending San Jacinto College are familiar with a project down in the rice village area where somebody wanted to build a large high-rise of a high-rise apartment complex and many people were very negatively about that project they were very negative about the project highly opposed to the project and we saw that there were lawsuits brought about as well as protests picketing there was a lot of negative reaction by the people that lived in that community to having a large high-rise in their community so the project managers have to deal with those stakeholders that have a negative influence on the project very differently than somebody that has a positive influence and you can probably think of some examples in your work history or your personal history where a project has gone on and there are people that are very enthusiastic and helpful and there are people that are very negative and opposed to that project and you'll note that your communication with those different stakeholders is very different and we'll be talking about communication as a project manager more this term as well finally the other roles in project manager are the project manager and the project team the project manager directs the work of the project and the project team of course does the work of the project and please note that project team members are also stakeholders because they are doing the work of the project so they have a vested interest in the project some of that is just to get a paycheck at the end of the week but some of it is also because they're able to use our technical expertise and demonstrate that they are very well qualified to work on the project and a lot of times project team members will take they'll be very motivated and enthusiastic about working on the project so there are several process groups or phases to a project and we call these the initiating planning executing monitoring and controlling and closing phases or process groups what happens during the initiating phase which your textbook also calls defining is your starting to think about what project might you do what would be those boundaries at triple constraint of the project and you know which project if you only have a limited budget are you going to remodel the kitchen are you going to remodel the bathroom because you have a limited budget so that's the kind of decision making that goes on in the initiating phase in the planning phase which is where we're going to spend most of our time this term is thinking about all the different elements that have to come together to create a successful project so we're going to talk about how we plan the schedule of work how we plan the budget or cost that we're going of money that we're going to spend on the project we'll talk about quality planning and risk planning communication with all those different stakeholders how do we acquire and train team members that's all part of planning and the theory is that the better we do on our upfront planning then the better we'll do on executing or actually implementing the project and while we're actually implementing the project we're going to be taking a look at how well it's performing compared to the plan that's called monitoring and controlling so remember we talked about that a project has to include measurable performance results monitoring and controlling is where we take a look at the results to date with numbers and compare those to the plan so if we are building a house and we expect the framing to be done within two weeks at two weeks into the object execution we'll take a look in check is all the framing done and that will give us a percentage completion number so monitoring controlling is checking to see how we're doing against the plan and then the final stage of the project process groups is called closing and that's when we end the project remember the project involves a temporary team of workers that are cross-functional at the closing point those workers are sent back to their prime function on sometimes if it's a contract position those workers are released and can go find another position so at the closing point we end the project remember projects are defined by a start and end date and so closing involves ending the project and then also learning lessons from what we did right and what could have been done better during the execution of a single particular project so you'll want to be familiar with these five process groups this is likely to be a test question where the five process groups are initiating planning executing monitoring and controlling and closing so project management back talking about that triple constraint the scope the schedule in the cost we generally start with planning the scope of work looking at the project objective defining the scope and creating what's called the WBS or work breakdown structure and we'll be talking about that in a later chapter and then once we've got that scope of work we'll look at the schedule where we define specific activities that have to be done and in what order those activities have to be done and we'll also talk when we talk about scheduling what sort of resources do we have to assign in order to get that amount of work done in a certain amount of time so I had to have the roof replaced on my house a couple years ago and and my neighbor just replaced their roof there were like four or five guys working during the entire time of reroofing the house and it took about three days for there in about three days for my house if you'd have only had two guys working instead of five guys it would take six or seven days because there's only a certain amount of work that can be done there's an old saying that you cannot increase the schedule you have there's a certain work that has to be done and it has to do it's an old joke about if it takes one woman nine months to have a baby you cannot make that baby come if you have nine women working on that same project so that's the kind of thing with resources that we talk about in scheduling and then in cost once we understand what those tasks are in the scope of work how long they're going to take and what type of resources were assigning during the scheduling tools then we can determine how much it's going to cost because we know how much our resources are per hour and so we can make an estimate of the project baseline which is part of the project budget so that's a specific term we'll talk about later as well so the project lifecycle and you'll see this in your textbook in Figure 1.1 again that defining or initiating phase is where we talk about the goals the requirements what tasks and responsibilities might be involved in the project during the planning phase we have very detailed discussions and create schedules we create very detailed budgets we look again at the resources the risks and the staffing during the execution of the project we'll concentrate a lot on that monitoring and controlling phase where we're measuring how we're doing against the plan that we created earlier and then in closing we're going to transfer the product to the customer so if you've built a house you transfer the house is ready for your your client to move in and put their stuff in the house and start living in it so that's the closing phase the most important part about closing is doing an evaluation and lessons learned review about how well did the project go and did we learn anything that we can apply to our next project project managers face some some specific challenges because the work is temporary it's new very often new and does not repeat activities that people are familiar with the project manager has to act independently of a formal organization we will talk about organizational structures in Chapter three sometimes the project manager has a lot of conflicts to negotiate resources for the project that includes equipment people and money as well as time the project manager is often talking with functional managers in order to negotiate those resources the project manager is also directly linked to the customer so the general contractor building a house has to always be talking to the customer to understand you know we've we put this doorway here it could go here the architect didn't make it clear on the blueprint so we put it here you know two feet from this wall but you know maybe if you'd like it over here we can move it you know two feet over so they need to have constant communication with the customer and the project manager is a strong influence on how the project team is motivated and enthused and how they carry out their work so the project manager also provides specific direction helps coordinate the work among these cross-functional team members and integrates all those diverse aspects into one common outcome for that project and ultimately the project manager is going to be held responsible for the performance remember our triple constraint of scheduled cost and scope and the success of the project and that's because the sponsor has spent a lot of money to make sure that the work gets done as planned so the project manager is really trying to induce the right people at the right time to address the right issues and make the right decisions so that's a pretty strong challenge for a project manager but I think you'll also find as we go through the term this in the textbook this term day project manager's job is is dynamic and it citing and gives you a lot of opportunity to rise to these challenges and demonstrate both managerial skills as well as so your textbook talks about the art in science of project management on the technical side there will be things that we're going to delve into pretty deeply this term on the art side we're going to talk about things like leadership problem-solving brainstorming negotiation and customer expectations those are all very hard to measure but if you do not meet these art side of project management requirements you're not going to be successful because if you meet only the science side you you may leave out some of those very important organizational and soft skill compliments that allow a project to be successful so a brief description of your week one homework please check blackboard for any revisions dates so you're going to want to one accept the syllabus two and define your project and both of those assignments should be done by email and they're both worth five points so please check blackboard for those due dates there's also an introductory discussion board where you're going to want to include your project description later on in the term we're going to do some peer reviews so this will be a good place to get to know your classmates as well as find if you have commonalities among your projects so your primary post will be due on the midnight on Saturday check the blackboard for due dates and then a week later your peer response will be due and the points for that or described in blackboard in your week one project assignment remember this counts towards the forty percent of your grade you're going to be completing just the basics the title the description and the objectives of your project remember that you need to include measurable success objectives you're not just building a house you're building a house that has specific outcomes involved it's a 2,000 square foot house 1 story 3 bedrooms 2 bathrooms very specific because your client is going to measure against those specific outcomes again I can't just say I want to be healthier I have to explain what healthier means by how much I should weigh what type of food I eat how frequently I exercise those are measurable and somebody can observe that and determine if I'm healthier because I've lost weight or I have eaten more fruits and vegetables again you'll want to check blackboard for exact so finally if you have any questions about the week one homework or chapter one please feel free to email me and again my email address is on blackboard thanks and I wish you a lot of good luck in this

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Keywords: San Jacinto College, project management

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Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2017