Project Management

              Project Management can be difficult even under the best of circumstances.  Accurate time estimation is a skill essential to good project management. It is important to get time estimates accurate for two core reasons: Time estimates drive the setting of deadlines for delivery of projects, and therefore peoples' assessments of consistency often establish the pricing of contracts and their profitability.

            A budget is one of those essential tools that are used across various departments within a company. For the project and project manager, it's a baseline used to conclude whether the project is on track.

Every project needs to balance its functionality, staffing, budget, schedule, and quality objectives, and selecting the best possible project team is essential to the project success while scheduling team members for more than 80% of their time may negatively affect the project even under the best of conditions. Tracking the average weekly hours that team members actually spend working on their project assignments is a real eye-opener. The task-switching overhead associated with the many activities that team members are asked to do, may reduce their effectiveness significantly. One cannot assume that just because someone spends 10 hours per week on a particular activity, he or she can do four of them at once; you’ll be lucky if he or she can handle three.

            If you don’t analyze, identify and control risks, they can end-up controlling you. Time should be spent during the project planning phase brainstorming possible risk factors, evaluating potential threats, and deciding how one can mitigate or prevent them.

            Almost all quality control activities, such as testing and technical reviews, find defects or other improvement opportunities. An accurate design plan impacts the quality of the project, and without requirements being met, the projects quality is compromised. 

            Both budget and time management can determine the success of the project, and recurrently working in conjunction with one another throughout the SDLC.

            Determining the project’s success can be done by sharing a common understanding of how the stakeholders will establish whether this project is successful and by retiring a high maintenance inherited system, and reaching a specified sales volume or revenue, increasing market shares, achieving specific customer satisfaction, and achieving volume with accuracy.