ACCA SBL Syllabus H. Innovation, Performance Excellence & Change Management - Monitoring the Project - Notes 11 / 12
Project management
Ensuring the goals of the project are achieved:
on time
within budget
to the required quality
We now know the project manager's tasks but remember she also has to understand which tasks cannot begin until others have been completed, and which tasks can be carried on at the same time.
After planning, comes the controlling and monitoring of the project
This involves keeping things on schedule and there dealing with any slippages in time or cost over-runs
Scope management
The risk is that project specification is not reached, so this involves breaking down the total project into individual tasks
‘Scope creep’ happens when during the course of the project, uncontrolled scope changes are made to the it takes longer and costs more than necessary to complete.
Time management
Non time-critical task can be delayed, so special attention is paid to those time critical ones
Another problem is that all time planning is based on estimates
As mentioned above, the project manager needs to identify the inter-dependencies between certain tasks.
Which have to be done before others and which can be done in parallel
This is called critical path analysis or network analysis
Monitoring completion times: slippage
A CPA chart can be used by the project manager to:
Ensure time-critical activities are being completed on schedule
Calculate maximum delays possible for none-time critical task
See when slippage has occurred and allocate extra resources if necessary
Cost management
The expected financial returns might be expressed in terms of net present value (NPV) and payback, or internal rate of return on investment (IRR).
However, costs need to stay within budget, for these returns to materialise
Standard costing techniques will be used to analyse the difference between budgeted and actual costs.
The difference will be caused by either:
actual spending is higher than planned
the amount of work done is more or less than budgeted.
These are expenditure variances and volume variances.
Project Gateways
These are review points for critical points in the project.
They ensure the business case remains valid
At each project gateway - If there are problems then control measures and corrective action will be necessary (or stop if severely off course)
Normally carried out by someone not involved in the project
A Product Breakdown Structure
This looks at the physical components of a particular product. It comes in the form of a hierarchy.
It begins with the final product at the top of the hierarchy followed by the sub-categorised elements of the product.
It reduces a complex project, or product, into manageable components.As a result, teams can obtain a clear understanding of a product, its components, and what is required to provide those components
Threat Identification
This will obviously reduce the risk of slippage and other problems
Threat Prevention
| Threat | Prevention |
|---|---|
| Poor management or planning or controls | Training managers, no critical projects until proved themselves |
| Poor Planning | Use proper planning methods |
| Poor Controls | Set out in advance |
| Unrealistic deadline | Ensure no slippage and change deadlines |
| Insufficient budgets | Do a smaller project properly |
| Moving targets | Structured walkthroughs and prototyping |
Corrective action examples
Fast tracking - doing some phases in parallel (instead of in sequence)
Crashing - reducing the time available on critical aspects while minimising the cost of doing so
Adding resources
Reducing scope or quality
Incentives and punishments