Project Management
INTRODUCTION:
The purpose of the manual is to highlight the objectives and deliverables for students doing their course work project in Project Management module.
Learning Outcomes
1. Apply basic principles of management to the use of materials, plant and labour on construction projects.
2. Identify the issues involved in securing productivity gains in construction.
3. Produce programmes for low complexity projects using appropriate manual techniques.
4. Use project planning software to generate master programmes for simple construction or design projects.
TASK:
The following project case is exercise that can be solved individually. In the project, students will have hands-on experience in developing an integrated framework for the planning, scheduling, resource management, and project costs.
Data:
In the following project (Figure 1), a two-level residential house is to be constructed. The objective is to prepare a realistic bid and prepare complete plan. Your resource bank involves crews, material, and subcontractor resources are given in the attached "Coursework Project- Data" Excel sheet. List of project activities, durations, logical relationships, and list of required resources are given in Table 1. On the other hand, crews' data, materials data, and subcontractors' data are given in Table2, Table3, and Table 4 respectively.
Figure 1: House PlanRequirements
The fundamental aim of this assignment is to allow students to apply the sets of skills and knowledge that was accumulated to demonstrate his ability in preparing a reasonable plan for a project through:
1. Suggest and discuss the Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) and present it as an organizational chart.
2. Construct Gantt chart and Activity on Node networks manually and use Microsoft Project to construct both of them (after changing the default format) with detailed discussion.
3. Present and discuss the scheduling output (e.g. project duration, critical path, critical tasks (change the format of the critical tasks), activities times (ES, EF, LS, LF) and floats (TF, FF). Also, increase the duration of two activities (e.g. activity # 5 and activity # 10) by 7 days and inspect what is the new project duration (without printing of Gantt chart).
4. Discuss and draw the resources (crews/manpower, materials, and subcontractors) profiles (histogram) that are needed to accomplish the work (three histograms for each resource).
5. Discuss and estimate project cost (according to given data), print the cash flow report (Visual Report) and draw the project cost curves.
6. Discuss the reasons behind and the effect of lowering of crews' production rate along with the suggested procedure to improve the production rate.
7. Suggest the procedure to reduce the duration of the project by 20% and use Microsoft Project to construct the Gantt chart after reducing project duration.
Report Proposal
Your proposal should include the following:
Step 1 - Executive Summary/Introduction (approximately 1 paragraph)
The Introduction is the most important section of the proposal - it will either get your reader's attention or send them to the next proposal. To be effective, you want to outline the proposal and convince the reader that your proposal should be accepted. Specifically:
A. State the problem/need that you are going to address.
B. Provide a short description of the project, including what you propose, who it will benefit.
D. Strong concluding statement.
Step 2 - Project Description (Maximum one Page)
This section defines the project objectives, describes the method of solution, and defines staffing and administrative requirements. Include the following sections (each of these sections should have a separate section heading and may have more than one paragraph).
1. Objectives - State your objectives as measurable outcomes of the solution. Be specific - make sure your solution is achievable within a specific time frame and measurable.
2. Method - Describe the specific action items (actions that need to be taken in order to meet the objectives). Answer the following questions: How, When, and Why.
3. Management Plan - Present "Time Plan" Only in your project.
Step 3 - Conclusion (Approximately 1 paragraph)
Review your proposal briefly. Restate what you want to do and why it's important.