The concepts and use of project management tools, techniques and methodologies are becoming all pervasive. This course addresses project management in the context of IT projects, including software projects. Using the framework of project life cycle, the course covers various aspects pertaining to (i) project initiation, (ii) project planning and scheduling, (iii) project monitoring and control, and (iv) project termination. For planning and scheduling of projects, the use of project network and estimation of time and cost are covered in detail. Scheduling of projects with resource limitations is covered next.
Risk assessment methods including simulation and risk reduction approaches are also be covered. The students will be required to use the software @risk to simulate project completion times. The use of Earned Value Analysis for Project Monitoring and Control is emphasized. For Software Project Management, the Waterfall Model and Agile Project Management are covered in detail.
From the lesson
Project Network Scheduling and Crashing
This module will cover Project Planning which is the second phase of Project Life Cycle. We first look at what Project Scope is and what scope creep refers to. Work Breakdown structure leading to work packages or activities with the associated precedence relationships are treated in detail. The next topic is about scheduling of the activities which requires the estimation of activity durations. The estimation of duration, cost and resource required for the identified activities are covered later as a separate topic. Here, using the same software development project, assuming that the durations of the activities have been estimated and ignoring the resource requirements for the different activities, we show how a schedule for the activities can be arrived at. The next topic is the estimation of durations, cost and resources required for the activities. Three popular estimating procedures are covered. The next topic covers the various reasons, possible benefits and different alternatives for reducing project duration. We then discuss in detail, one approach to reducing project duration viz. by incurring additional incremental direct cost for reducing activity durations and show how we can arrive at the least incremental direct cost for any specified project completion time. While the approach presented is conceptually sound it is difficult to implement for large projects. So, the next topic covers a linear programming approach to solve the same problem even if the project under consideration is large in terms of the number of activities. As in the previous module, towards the end of this module also, we present some practical aspects pertaining to the concepts covered. This again is done through a Q & A format with Mr. Prashun Dutta, Advisor - Gaiga Smart Cities