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Project Management Companion Newsletter
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Making Project Goal Trade-offs
The project Manger makes trade-offs between the projects goals of cost, time, and performance. The PM must also make trade-offs between project progress and process, that is, between the technical and managerial functions. The first set of trade-offs is required by the need to preserve some4 balance between the project time, cost and performance goals. Conventional wisdom had it that the precise nature of the trade-offs varied depending on the stage of the project life cycle. At the beginning of the life cycle, when the project is being planned, performance was felt to be the most important goal, with cost and schedule sacrificed to the technical requirements of the project. Following the design phase, the project builds momentum, grows, and operates at peak levels. Because it accumulates costs at the maximum rate during this period, cost was felt to take precedence over performance and schedule. Finally, as the project nears completion, schedule becomes the high priority goal, and cost suffers.
During the design or information stage of the project life cycle, this is no significant difference in the importance project manager’s place on the three goals. It appears that the logic of this finding is based on the assumption that the project must be designed in such a way that it meets all the goals set by the client. If compromises must be made, each of the objectives is vulnerable. At times, however, a higher level of technical performance may be possible that, in the client’s eye, merits some softening of the cost or schedule goals. For example, a computer software project required that an information system be able to answer queries within 3 seconds 95 percent of the time. The firm designed such a system by ensuring that it would respond within 1.5 seconds 50 percent of the time. By meeting this additional standard, more stringent than that imposed by the client, it was able to meet the specific standard.
Schedule is the dominant goal during the build-up stage, being significantly more important that performance, which is in turn significantly more important than cost. Scheduling and performance are approximately tied for primacy during the main stage of the life cycle when both are significantly more important than cos, though the importance of cost increases somewhat between the build-up and main stages. During the final stage, phase-out performance is significantly more important than schedule, which is significantly more important than cost.
The second set of trade-offs concern sacrificing smoothness of running the project team for technical progress. Near the end of the project it may be necessary to insist that various team members work on aspects of the project it may be necessary to insist that various team members work on aspects of the project for which they are not well trained or which they do not enjoy, such as copying or collating the final report. The PM can get fairly good reading on team morale by paying attention to the response to such requests. This is, of course another reason why the PM should select team members which have a strong problem orientation. Discipline-orientated people want to stick to the tasks for which they have been prepared and to which they have been assigned. Problem-orientated people have little hesitation in helping to do whatever is necessary to bring the project in on time, to ‘spec”, and within budget.
The PM also has t responsibility for other types of trade-offs, ones rarely discussed in the literature of project management. If the PM directs more than one project, he or she must make trade-offs between the several projects. It is advisable, for when a project manager is directing two or more projects, care should be taken to ensure that the life cycles of the projects are sufficiently different that the projects will not demand the same constrained resources at the same time, thereby avoiding forced choices between projects.
In addition to the trade-offs between the goals of a project, and between projects, the PM will also be involved in making choices that require balancing the goals of the project with the goals of the firm. Such choices are common. Indeed, the necessity for such choices is inherent in the nature of the project management. The PM’s enthusiasm about a project, a prime requirement for successful project management. Can easily lead him or her to overstate the benefits of a project, to understate the probable costs of the project completion, to ignore technical difficulties in achieving the required level of performance, and to make trade-offs decisions that are clearly biased in favour of the project and antithetical to the goals of the parent organisation. Similarly, this enthusiasm can lead the PM to take risks not justified by the likely outcomes.
Finally, the PM must make trade-off decisions between the project, the firm, and his or own career goal’s. Depending on the PM’s attitudes toward risk, career considerations might lead the PM to take inappropriate risks or avoid appropriate ones.
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Project Quality,
Hi team, today I would like to cover how is project quality measured.
Quality is a parameter which normally equates to the successful
delivery of a project, within budget and to scope are just some of the
accepted criteria. There are two types of quality which make up almost
every project. One is the product quality, which refers to the quality
of the deliverable from the project, this being the traditional tools of
quality control, such as performance, cost and time. The second relates
to the actual project management process itself that is the governance
behind managing a project and the tools available to us for successful
delivery.
The focus is on how well the project management process works and how
it can be improved. Remember we are always looking at ways to better
deliver projects, whether it is through the use of standard processes or
customer feedback, actually any mechanism available to us to build our
success rate. Continuous quality improvement and process quality
management are areas we should always look into, as they are the tools
used to measure quality process.
The reference to the identified quality requirements consist of the
following, conformity, usability, efficiency, maintainability, response
time, flexibility, portability, security, audit-ability and the actual
impact to the job itself. Each of these quality attributes has a
criteria subset, for example, conformity is a measure of completeness
and traceability.
It is clear that some of these attributes are
potentially incompatible, as security could degrade response time and
usability could degrade efficiency.
A good project manager should attempt to gain a consensus on what
quality attributes are required for the project deliverables before
planning the project and negotiate a formal quality agreement. Simply
put, different quality attributes have different impact on the project
estimates. While some attributes such as maintainability and flexibility
have relatively low impact, that is, a requirement to make a system
maintainable would not add a significant cost to the project – others
have a major impact, efficiency, usability, and portability require
significant effort to achieve. It is essential that the project manager
and team clearly understand the requisite quality requirements before
they finalise the project estimates.
A sound quality management program with processes in place that
monitor the work in a project would be a good investment. Not only does
it contribute to the customer satisfaction, it helps organisations use
their resources more effectively and efficiently by reducing waste and
rework. This is one area that should not be compromised. The payoff is a
higher probability of successfully completing the project and
satisfying the customer.
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