Project Management Questions & answers

1. What are some tools for collecting requirements from stakeholders? #

There are different tools which can collect the stakeholder needs from which the most common is questionnaire and surveys which tells about the stakeholders’ requirements and what the company really needs to address these problems. The company can also conduct interviews, brainstorming, multi voting, and multi-criteria decision making, autocratic decision making is some of the tools which can be used to collect the stakeholder needs and requirements.

2. Explain how you would resolve competing requirements from stakeholders. #

Stakeholder’s competing requirements can be resolved by prioritizing the stakeholder needs and demand of the requirement to be fulfilled by the stakeholders. Stakeholders are of two types which are internal stakeholders and external stakeholders. Internal stakeholders are the shareholders and employees of the organization. External stakeholders include the customers, public, suppliers and pressure groups. Stakeholders have different requirements and sometimes they are conflicting and for this stakeholder’s process needs to be identified.

Identify all stakeholders related to the company

Prioritize the needs of the stakeholders and stakeholders need to be prioritized according to their stakes.

Know all the requirements of the stakeholders and understand those requirements to the fullest.

Define the framework and system to ensure that all requirements are met.

Make any necessary tradeoffs decision to get to the right decision and take action according to the best possible option and communicate all the stakeholders involved in the process.

3. What is the purpose of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)? What are 3 best practices in developing the WBS? #

The primary objective of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is to divide the project into smaller units or elements to focus and complete each unit on time. It is not easy to work and monitor the whole project as a unit. Therefore, WBS helps to divide the work and it helps to provide information regarding dependent and independent, urgent, and non-urgent tasks in the project. Three best practices in developing the WBS include decomposition, control account, and work package. The decomposition strategy aims to divide the project into smaller tasks and assign those resources and costs. The control account technique helps to integrate the schedule, budget, actual cost, and scope of the project and compare these with the earned value of the project. The work package techniques help to determine the lowest level of the work to make sure resources and costs and assigned easily.

4. Define the following methods for developing project estimates: #

5. Analogous Estimating

The method of compass is the analogous component of the current project with the analogue’s component of the previous or similar project of the company. The components like material, labor cost, equipment, risk of the project and inflation to compare it with the similar and previous project. The complexity in this method is that it compared with the previous and old project which sometimes can be difficult to compare and updating the old and past data the more old the data, more complex the comparison will be.

1. Bottom Up Estimating

In this estimating method the project is breakdown in to the work packages and the cost of each work package is estimated and then summarized to estimate the cost of the project.

1. Parametric Estimating

In this method the statistical relationship between the previous and current project is developed. In which all the components of the given project cost and other components using the statistics the more accurate the statistic analysis the more accurate the estimate will be.

1. Three-Point Estimating

In the following method, the three different estimates are established

In which they gave the probability of most likely, optimistic and pessimistic and some firms are average out the results to take the best estimate.

5. Define the critical path. How is it beneficial to the project manager to know the critical path of the project? #

The critical path is the longest distance between the start and finish of a project and it includes all the project tasks and their respective duration. It is beneficial to the project manager to know the critical path of the project as it helps to provide a clear picture of the actual schedule of the project. It provides information regarding the big and small tasks and the time needed to complete these tasks. The project manager can plan these tasks to ensure the project completes on time and within the allocated resources. Moreover, it provides information regarding the dependent and independent tasks and their influence on the project’s outcome and completion.

6. Examine the following network diagram. List all possible sequences (chain/path) of activities and define the total duration for each path.  What is the critical path? #

Part A

WEEKS A= 4, B = 6, C= 4, D = 12, E=7, F = 9, G = 5, Total Duration = 47 weeks

The critical path is D, F, E, C has a longer duration and is the critical path

Part B

Draw a network diagram.

Determine the critical path using PERT estimates.

What is the expected project duration?

START

END

Critical path A = 5, B=12, C=5, E = 15 , F = 8, G = 3, H = 6, I = 5.

According to the most probable duration, the project will take 59 days.

Critical Path B, E, F, H as they have the longest duration in the project cycle.

7. A project is expected to last 16 weeks, however, at week 8, the project is already 2 weeks behind (i.e. the estimate of 6 week’s worth of work has been completed).  Calculate the schedule variance (SV) and schedule performance index (SPI). #

SV = Earned Value – Planned Value

SV = 6-8 = -2

SPI = 6/8 = 0.75

8. Read the case study about Walt Disney (p. 613-632) #

Answer (on p. 632) the following questions: 1, 4, 7, 8, 10

1. They initially did not understand the cultural issues which is the main issue for declining revenues as at the time the Japanese economy is booming and Europe especially the French economy is on the decline. Disney has not put proper efforts in view of some critics are not enough as they are not understanding the differences which is also an issue for their revenue stream and for their brand and company image and the table shows that they need to understand the cultural differences for the good of their revenue streams.
2. Lessons learned from Disney land that the cultural differences can have an impact on the company product and services which showed in the case study as they have faced the fluctuating revenues over the years and these impacted Disney which needs to do the restricting of the debt between 1993 and 2013 which was major restructuring due to the environmental and cultural factors they have ignored.
3. From the case study, it is shown that not all the factors are in control which are environmental or cultural environmental factors and cultural factors can be controlled to some extent and the project management states that all the things cannot be controlled but their impact can be significantly mitigated compared to the past practices.
4. By planning efficiently and in detail for each project management event and utilizing all the best available tools to have the best estimates for the project management can help significantly reduce the last minute changes scope as these decisions are impulsive and did not cover all the project aspects of the company and can be managed more efficiently if the required techniques tools and project management strategies are used.
5. Yes, the enterprise environmental factors should be tracked like the others report budgets and schedules to better know the impact on the environment and the enterprise contribution to it the project management and specifically corporate social responsibility reporting are emphasizing on the importance of green reporting which CSR responsibility companies are adopting and making it the part of their reporting.