BUS 528 - PM Chapter 11 Ideas

Clear Communication among Project Stakeholders

Project communication is a plan for getting massages across; it requires constant, effective communication among all stakeholders involved in the project, so that we can ensure the right people have the right information to make the right decision and make an output what we expected.

A clear project communication plan should contain the following communication information:

-          Project communication strategy

-          The kick-off meeting

-          Roles and responsibilities of the team

-          Project status meetings and frequency

-          Change control communications

-          Project review meetings

-          Transition from deployment to operations

-          Closure meeting

A good project communication structures will make team members easier to interact. Moreover the project manager needs strong communication skills to enable communication with the structures and sets up the tone for project communication by the discipline with which they display in using the communication channels to produces accurate, timely  and useful status report for holding all stakeholders accountable to their reporting responsibilities. Besides, the manager’s style and attitude will color all relationships on the project when he/she works with the many team members who encounter on the project.

BUS 528 - Effective Meeting Guidelines

 (refer to page 275)

Last Friday, I was invited to a meeting for organizing an activity in October. Follow to the effective meeting guidelines as we read on the book:

Before the meeting – Yes, I received the invitation by a phone call few days before the meeting. I did know the purpose of the meeting and who else will be attending the meeting.

During the meeting - I got the copy of meeting agenda, but there were just few items and described roughly for discussing. People came about 20 late before the meeting got starting. We followed the agenda instruction and discussed the topics. We had a temporary recorder tracking decision and key points for the actions. But there were just few people kept talking, most of us stayed silent for the entire meeting....it’s a dinner meeting setting at 7:00 pm, we were very hungry!

Ending the meeting – The chair did not summarized the meeting, he ended the meeting suddenly and asked to serve dinner right after the meeting.

After the meeting – I received the meeting minutes about two days later. But there didn’t note about the next meeting date.

I don’t think it was a successful meeting and did not follow the effective meeting guidelines at all because it proceeded very sloppy. It combined with a dinner and a meeting; I doubt it is a good idea to call a meeting. If I’m the chair, I’ll prefer set up the meeting either before or after the meal. Probably I’ll set up meeting time at 6:00 pm before the dinner, so that people would more concentrate on discussion. When all the attendees are seated, I will emphasis the importance of “on time” that makes our meeting effectively. During the meeting, I’ll encourage everyone to express their opinions and get the maximum feedback from people. At the end of meeting, the chair should summarize the meeting by reviewing the decisions and action items and reserve a schedule for the next meeting date.

BUS 528 - PM Chapter 10 Ideas

Building a High-Performance Project Team

Project management is a team work task; we want the people on the team to hold themselves mutually accountable to a common goal and to work together in harmony to build plans, manage risk and perform tasks in the process. There are three major parts in a framework that helps the project manager to build a high-performance team:

1. A positive team environment – Publish the project goal stated with clear terms of values of the team.  A team leader is with responsibility of project-focused tasks, gets committed supports for the team work and well knows how to collaborate the strengths and contributions of all team members.  The entire team member should be respectful, be helpful and trust to others when there is any demand on problem solving. The necessary meetings should be with effective results steered toward the goals.

2. Collaborative Problem-Solving – A project management is a problem solving process. The project manager should be able to develop the capabilities including problem-solving skills, making an appropriate / possible decision for the project, leveraging conflict to make the best solution under strong relationships, building the team’s culture by continuous learning to improve project performance.

3. Leadership – Project leader establish a positive team environment for his/her team and takes the team members to achieve the goal performance. Make sure the team keeps good communication and discussion, with which the team members may get fundamental human motivation and morale. Leadership is the keystone of the high-performance team framework. In order to lead a project team, the project manager should be with leadership essentials about maintaining a strategic vision, developing a team culture that all the members are encouraged to promote their learning, attending to individual team member and keep a strong relationship in work, attending to the identified factors in the high-performance team framework, keeping a flexible leadership style to match the needs of the team.

BUS528 - PM / Planning Checklist

(go though Planning Checklist on page. 217)

1. The essential items for my project

            1-1. Project Objectives – It is about the expectation of project outcome that all the stakeholders should clearly understand the requirements and the affected areas of the project, and how the process making the expected results possible.

            1-2. WBS with documenting deliverables – Indicating how the process works to achieve the goal with a developing estimated schedule of the project.

            1-3. Project Plan – Focused on the project management system giving the detailed time lines and relationships between the task and resources.

            1-4. Product Description and Acceptance Criteria – Set up the detailed outline of the product (or service) which should match the defined criteria without any misunderstanding.

            1-5. Risk Management – Draft a list of the possible problems that might happen during the process and impact on the project. Especially some of the risks make an alternative plan. Risk management system should be with certain risk response strategies, and each risk should be assigned the responsibility to an individual.

            1-6. Communication Plan – Define communication requirements based on roles, what information will be communicated, how the information will be communicated, when the information will be distributed, who does the communication, who receives the communication...etc.

            1-7. Resource Plan – The outlines information may include cost estimates for each resource, availability of each resource, estimated quality and output of people and equipment resources.

2. The items those are NOT appropriate for my project

            2-1. Risk Management / There is a plan in place for continuously identifying and responding to new risks – No doubt we should keep watching out if any new risks occurred during the process and take appropriate action to fix the problems immediately, but we don’t need to have a plan as an subtask to do so.

            2-2. Task Sequence / External schedule constraints are represented by milestones – The project is about setting up a new dept. in the organization, so it’s no specific milestones to present any external schedule constraints.

            2-3. Scheduling / Portions of the schedule that contain many concurrent tasks have been evaluated for risk – It’ not necessary for my project to list this extra risk evaluation on scheduling because we have considered and combined it in our risk management system.

            2-4. Vendors and Subcontractors / The work to be performed by vendors and subcontractors is integrated into the WBS and schedule – In my project, the team members are asked (to take responsibility) to perform their works , even though some of works are outsourcing for subcontractors.

             

BUS 552 Accounting / Week 6 HW

Textbook p.320  / E6-20                               

Computing and Interpreting the Receivables Turnover Ratio

(Refer to the data reported by Dell, Inc.)

1. Determine the accounts receivable turnover ratio and average days sales in receivables for the current year.

The receivables turnover ratio is composed as following formula:

Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio = annual credit sales / average accounts receivable

So, the current year receivables turnover ratio for Dell, Inc.:

                              $41,444,000

              ------------------------------------------   = 13.3

               ($2,586,000 + $3,635,000) / 2

365 / receivables turnover ratio is average days sales in receivables, which indicates the average time it takes a customer to pay its accounts. For Dell, Inc., the amount would be computed as follows for current year:

365 / 13.3 = 27.4 (days)

2. Explain the meaning of each number.

The receivables turnover ratio is an activity ratio, measuring how efficiently a company uses its assets. It is usually a positive sign if a company is with a high, or increasing accounts receivables turnover ratio – it means that the company is well executing its credit policies and quickly turning its accounts receivable into cash. But it also needs to be considered if the company is too strict in its credit policies, which might be missing out on potential sales.

The average days sales is a calculation used by a company to estimate their average collection period. A low number of days indicates that the company collects its outstanding receivables quickly. So, in this case, Dell has its account receivable policy (term) at net 27.4 days.

BUS528 - PM Chapter 9 Ideas

Balancing the Trade-off among Cost, Schedule and Quality

The responsibility of a project manager is to seek the most efficient and the best way of getting a work done. But certainly the job will never go smoothly as we expect, there are many factors or sudden changes or problem arise that the project must think all the time. It is a process for the project manager to decide on a trade-off between time (schedule), cost (money) and resources which achieves the highest-quality project result. Based on the kind of change needed, there are three different levels of balancing a project in an organization:

Balancing at the project level – Making changes to keep the project on track for its original cost, schedule and quality objectives.

1. The Optimist’s choice is re-estimate the project, which helps the manager to make a second round of estimating to make a firmer foundation of acts supporting cost, schedule and resource estimates.

2. Change task assignments to take advantage of schedule float, by which the project schedule can be more flexible and the labor cost can be controlled when we consider moving people from noncritical tasks to critical tasks.

3. Adding people to the project team to make the job done faster. But for sure, it should be required as “qualified” resources; we say they are the most available people.

4. Increase productivity by using experts from within the firm. These high performers are with technical competence, well problem solving skills and more positive attitudes, who can make other people more productive.

5. For some so specialized works, we should look for increasing productivity by using experts from outside the firm to participate in product development discussions and to move the project along faster.

6. Outsourcing the entire project or a significant portion of it. Outsourcing is at the high end of the risk/return spectrum, but it should be still “under control” (do not under estimate the risks of outsourcing), such as finding qualified vendors and coming to clear agreements before work begins. Eventually, the result can be expected to be in greater productivity and shortened the project schedule.

7. Crashing the schedule if the tasks are on the critical path and need to be compress based on the cheapest cost.

8. The project manager must demonstrate clearly the ways of Working Overtime that extra work will be effective benefit on the project. Also, all the project team members agree and understand the demands of working overtime.

Balancing at the business case level – The business case for the project must be reevaluated because the cost-schedule-quality goals cannot be achieved at the project level.  This reevaluation requires the authorization of all the stakeholders.

1. Reducing the product scope so that the requirements are met more accurately. Start by prioritizing the requirements, then analyzing the cost-benefit trade off of each requirement to improve the value of the product with more quickly and a lower cost.

2. When Fixed-phase scheduling is employed, the project phases are apportioned from the top down and scheduled according to the required completion date. Be sure the functionality is prioritized, ensuring only low-priority functions are cut during each phase review.

3. Fast-tracking can decrease the project schedule on overlapping tasks. But overlap is the risk, so all the team members should know the risk that might exist in the very initial assumptions with some mistakes.

4. Phased product delivery benefits on delivering something as soon as possible so that it can reduce the negative impacts to ongoing business operation. Phased product delivery also reflects an immediately feedback to improve the developing products and gets phased payment. The best application on phased product delivery is to modularized products, then its components can operate independently because not all products can be implemented a piece at a time.

5. Do it twice – quickly and correctly. Especially when we are in hurry, we should try building a quick and short term at the first, then go back to improve the second one. This is an alternative to use when the product demand is in an intense and urgent situation.

6. If the project to be asked for cost down, reducing the profit margin is a way to be considered.  This is a viable option when a company must remain competitive to survive in a difficult market.

Balancing at the enterprise level – It mostly happens when a firm is with the conditions of insufficient equipment, personnel and budget. In spite of all the effort, it may not finish a single project.

1. If money is not an issue for a firm, outsourcing is can help to achieve the goals of projects.

2. Phased (small) product delivery helps more projects running at the same time.

3. Shifting work to the customer on many different projects. Use people with flexible ways to support additional projects.

4. Reducing product scope on several projects. Less considering on single product function, and more focusing on cost and benefit trade-off analysis among projects.

5. Using Productivity tools as a strategy to improve productivity across projects. The project manager has to create a vision of what is possible and then to rebalance the project in such a way that the vision can become a reality.

BUS528 - PM Chapter 8 Ideas

Accurate Estimating

Estimating is forecasting the future in an uncertain world, trying to predict the time and money necessary to produce a result. But estimation is a difficult process because it’s one of the most critical components of a successful project.

Proper estimation is one of the key skills that make task operation possible. After estimating the fundamentals of the project, this chapter provides some established estimating techniques / methods to help us understand and apply them for the dynamics of accurate estimating.

Phased Estimating – This is basically cost estimating considerations by project life cycle (or product development life cycle).  Every phase of the development life cycle is treated as a project. Managers use the phased estimated approach to review the cost-schedule-quality during the product development life cycle. Phased estimating is the same concept as we learned to break the effort into manageable pieces, so that we can estimate a whole lot better when our task analysis phases are small.

Apportioning (top-down estimating) – Using top-down estimating technique, the project manager has to rely on previous data from similar project to quickly estimate the costs of the current project. Top down estimating gives a fast estimate but might be not accurate at all.

Parametric Estimate – Parametric estimate uses the statistical relationship that exists between a series of historical data and a particular delineated list of other variables. It seeks a basic unit of work to act as multiplier to size the entire project. This technique can produce higher levels of accuracy depending upon the sophistication and the underlying data built into the model.

Bottom-up Estimating – Bottom-up estimation is accurate because it always takes a long time to do a thorough estimation of the project by estimating each single package in the work breakdown structures. It allows for the ability to get a more refined estimate of a particular component of work.