Prioritizing
Projects seldom have the money, time, or resources to deliver everything wanted by the organization, users, or suppliers, even if delivery of everything has business justification.
This means that on most projects, scope (including acceptance criteria and quality specifications)must be prioritized whereby the project will attempt to deliver as much as possible and for which there is a business justification.
There are numerous ways to facilitate agreements on priorities over requirements. For example:
- categorizing criteria as must-have, should-have, could-have, or won’t have
- a product backlog approach that explains the sequence in which features will be made available to users (or in which criteria will be met)
- pairwise comparison to understand preferences between criteria
- the Kano model that describes features as delighters, performance features, and essential as a means of gauging customer satisfaction
- Eisenhower matrices, which assess criteria in two contrasting dimensions (for example, importance versus urgency or value versus ease of implementation).
- Prioritization techniques help to define scope tolerances, supporting the manage by exception principle.
Scheduling
Project schedules provide information on the sequencing, dependencies, and durations of activities, along with milestones. There are a variety of scheduling and presentation techniques that can be used, including the following:
- Gantt chart: it is a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the progression of time. Gantt charts are useful for projects with numerous activities and milestones and are compatible with many scheduling tools.
- spreadsheet: for simple projects, work packages and tasks can be listed with their corresponding timelines. This presentation can be difficult to maintain for large projects or projects with frequent changes in schedule.
- product checklist: it is a list of the major products of the plan and the key dates in their delivery. When the planned and actual dates for deliver y are displayed, this presentation provides a good summary of delivery performance over the project lifecycle.
- activity flow board: this technique shows how each product or product component progresses through the work of development or delivery. It is used in Kanban boards as w ell as other tools that are often used in iterative-incremental projects.
The schedule should identify the amount of time that an activity can be delayed without affecting the completion time of the plan. This is known as float or slack.
A schedule with zero float across all activities represents a high risk of delay and exception to the time tolerance.
A critical path diagram illustrates the sequence of activities from the start to the end of the project that have the least amount of total float. Any delay beyond the planned float between any two activities on the critical path means the project will overrun its schedule.
A weakness in the critical path diagram is that it does not address resource limitations. Therefore, it may be useful to identify the critical chain as well.
The critical chain is the sequence of tasks that, given available resources, prevents a project from being completed in a shorter time given.
For example, in a house building project, the critical chain might reflect the fact that local regulations prohibit outside construction work on weekends.
By identifying schedule constraints, the project manager can focus on changes in the schedule of activities, critical path, or critical chain as potential exceptions. Moreover, the project manager can avoid exceptions by adjusting the timing of activities with the available float or resource flexibilities.
Estimating
A variety of estimating techniques are available to project managers. These include the following:
- top-down: a top-down technique assumes that the costs, duration, and level of effort of the major products and work packages can be estimated to a high-level of confidence. These are then allocated to subordinate elements of the product breakdown structure and work breakdown structure. This technique could be used for an iterative-incremental project in which delivery is structured into stages and sprints with fixed timeframes and resources.
- bottom-up: a bottom-up technique develops estimates for individual products, components, activities, or tasks at their lowest level of definition.The lower-level estimates are then aggregated to obtain overall estimates. This technique is useful when the lower-level elements are well-understood but will be combined in a manner unique to the project or new to the organization.
- comparative: when the materials, products, or delivery work are well-understood and based on common practices, estimates can be developed based on similar projects or openly available market information.
- parametric: when measured or when empirical data on materials, effort, and duration is available and supported by estimating models (such as in the construction industry), estimates can be developed using values from the project, such as the number, units, or size of a structure.
- data analytics: descriptive analytics (understanding the characteristics of a task) and predictive analytics (understanding a task’s predisposition to particular outcomes) can be used to help improve estimates. This will require access to data that may be generated by the project, held by the business layer, or sourced from a data trust.
- subject matter expertise: consensus-based techniques, such as Delphi and planning poker, can be used to develop a consensus on estimates with the participation of subject matter experts.
Several estimating techniques are often used in large and complex projects. The project manager may seek support from specialists in cost estimation if they are available to the project.
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