PHASES OF A PROJECT

Projects are a very delicate and I think the importance of reflection during the life cycle of a
project cannot be over-emphasized. It allows for some time out to breathe and come up with new
and improved plan to help achieve the goal of the project. Team communication and monitoring
should also be incorporated at every step of the way to ensure that all are on the same page and
know exactly what is expected of them. A risk management plan should also be devised for
future purpose. Some of the lessons I learnt which will be useful to me when carrying out future
projects.

Based on the importance of reflection, following out all the objectives of the project to the end will
help make the project a success and without following out the set objectives may definitely lead
to failure of the project.

Any project I have been involved in I tend to get a little carried away with the initiation step (too
much enthusiasm). This is where more heads are better than one as I often don't foresee many
problems as I'm swept away with an idea. The life-cycle often jumps between the
initiation/planning/execution stage as more and more input is received from wider sources. I also
tend to skip the success end stage. I will reflect on the things that didn't go so well as information
for next time but once a successful project has closed, I quickly forget it and move on to the next.

Reflection is the element more important in every Project or any other chores that you are
involved. To analyse the situation and take the correctives measure is a key by the success.

You have to get over trying to be perfect and doing everythng perfectly. Mistakes
and the lessons learned from them are often more valuable and long lasting than the
projects you have done. The reflection process and being honest with yourself while
you reflect is a huge key to success. Also relising that failures along the way are
learning opportunities, they do not make you a failure unless you refuse to
accknowledge them and do something about them.

I find in my teaching that students that follow this process honestly are successful at
life. Tha ose that do not want to commit their plans to paper before they carry them
out are setting themselves up for major disappointment. As one psychologist who
spoke to us once put it, we all need to learn how to fail successfully - aka learn that
you will fail at some thinngs at some point in your life, but learn how to successfully
deal with those failures and move on to future successes.

This is why I love teaching my students Project Management. Those that get it carry
it through to the rest of their lives and are happier, more successful students and
people because of it.
We usually have 5 steps for our project's life cycle, thus initiation, planning, execution,
control and closure. Project tracking is also done during the course of a project During project
initiation we usually conduct feasibility study, to help to determine the likelihood of success
before spending resources. The stage of reflecting on a project is usually ignored.
Addressing these challenges in the future, i would do all of these and more:

-Agree on a stated timeline

-Have weekly meetings to agree on what has been done and what needs to be done in the
coming week.
-Assign tasks to team members and give timeline for deliverables
-Get the projected cost of materials at the planning stage. the cost will also be reviewed 2
weeks toi the event to confirm the market cost of items

Most of the challenges are faced at the execution step, thus mainly poor workmanship, delays
and budget overruns.

How might you address these challenges:

To solve this we use Pro-active, re-active, and organizational strategy. I usually adopt the pro-
active strategy at planning stage to predict and prevent cost overrun.
Proper project planning & scheduling.
Use of experienced and reputable contractors who can execute the project competently without
delays and cost overruns.
Systematic control mechanism such as quality control etc
Time is a major issue with a lot of the projects i'm involved with, very tight deadlines a lot of the
time.

Certain things help me to overcome this, communication with the project team, ensure all
stakeholders know what is expected. This helps to deliver the project in full and on time.

Great planning from the start, be sure that all parties know what is happening and when its
happening by.
Time is a major issue with a lot of the projects i'm involved with, very tight deadlines a lot of the
time.

Certain things help me to overcome this, communication with the project team, ensure all
stakeholders know what is expected. This helps to deliver the project in full and on time.

Great planning from the start, be sure that all parties know what is happening and when its
happening by.

SCOPE

Scoping may be negelected as people want to get stuck into implementing a project straight
away - they see planning as getting in the way of starting a project.
Scoping is important in understanding the complexity of a project - what milestones exactly are
involved, the various stakeholders that need to be involved, who needs to do what and when,
budget etc.

I believe sometimes scoping could be neglected as a phase of the project plan when the
"leaders" believe they "know" what they have to do and consider scoping as a waste of
time/money.
The importance of scoping is evident for any project planning process, and we can understand its
relevance on a daily basis, by breaking down what we need to do in order to achieve our
personal goals/projects.
If the person we are trying to convince does not have many experience in managing work
projects, I will take it to their personal level. Almost everyone want/had o would like to buy a

house/get married etc. I will commence from that point to make more understandable and will
guide them from there.

2.10 Project PLAN – Virginia book festival

1. Given the crucial path in Figure 2, how long will the project take?
233 days

2. Of the 164 tasks, which tasks should Jane Kulow, the Director of the Virginia Festival of the
Book,
focus her attention on?
8,12, 40, 41

3. How can we reduce the duration by 5 days, in order to meet the festival start date?
Check the critical path and try to solve the tasks 40 in 55 days.

2.11 How long to you think the project will take?

233 days

Of the 164 tasks, which tasks do you recommend Jane Kulow, the Director of the VFOB, focus
her attention on?

Critical paht as: 8, 12, 40 41 tasks...

2.14 In our final revisiting of The Virginia Festival of the Book,

we will now continue to use the case study to further examine
and understand how to reduce the duration of the plan. Feel
free to revisit The Importance of Project Planning in Action
video (The Importance of Planning) and the The Virginia
Festival of the Book articles (in Scoping and Identifying
Dependencies and Determining the Completion Date and
Critical Path) to review the previous information.

As a reminder, the overall project plan consisted of 164 tasks. Of

these, only five tasks were critical, as shown in Figure 2. Exhibit 2
exhibits a complete Gantt chart of the tasks. Both of these charts
can be accessed in the full case study article PDF attachment at the
bottom of this page under “Downloads.”

2.15 How Can We Reduce the Duration of the VFOB Project?

Now that you have reviewed the information for The Virginia
Festival of the Book case study, respond to the question
below:

How do you think we can reduce the duration by 5 days, in order to

meet the festival start date?

Click on the “Join the discussion” below. Read and respond to a few
of your fellow learners’ postings. Remember to ‘like’ posts that
resonate with you. After you complete your responses start
watching the video on Common Mistakes in Project Planning.

2.17 Share Your Experiences of Common Mistakes

Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne discussed some common

mistakes that firms make throughout the planning process.
She recommended that it is worth taking the time to pause and
reflect on these common mistakes to shed some light on what
you have done along the way that you might want to improve
as you develop your plans.

Pause and reflect on the following questions. Then share your

responses with your classmates.

1. What are some common mistakes that you have made during
the project planning process?
2. Given your common mistakes, how might you approach the
project planning process differently next time to improve the
development of your plan?

Click on the “Join the discussion” below. Read and respond to a few
of your fellow learners’ postings. Remember to ‘like’ posts that
resonate with you. After you complete your responses, be sure to
take the multiple choice assessment to test your learning of the
material this week.

2.19 From Scoping to Risks

Congratulations on completing Week 2 of the course!
Hopefully, you’ve gained some key insights into how to
develop a plan. During this week we started covering the ‘Plan’
stage of the Project Life-Cycle. You learned how to: identify the
scope; identify the tasks, dependencies, and schedule; plan
resources; and clarify trade-offs and decision making
principles. All of these tasks are components of the “plan”
phase.

During Week 3 of the course you will be introduced to another

component of the “Plan” stage, developing a risk management plan.
You will learn about the following topics: what makes projects risky;
how to identify and assess project risks; scheduling risk analysis;
cost risk analysis; and how to plan for ambiguity.

4.1 Executing Projects

Welcome to Ready, Set, Go: Project Execution! During week 4

we will focus on answering the following questions: How do
we execute projects? What approaches should we consider
implementing in doing so?

In our final week, we will move from plan to action and consider the
execution phase of a project. We’ll learn about the earned value
approach for monitoring and controlling progress. We will consider
the individuals who are executing the project and how their habits
impact project progress. We’ll discuss some alternative methods for
project execution such as Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. Finally, we
will review and summarize the course and our journey from project
definition through execution and completion.

4.3 Reflect on Your Experiences Executing a Project

You have listened to Professor Yael Grushka- Cockayne

explain the different types of questions that need be
considered and addressed as you work through the execution
of a project. Some of these questions include: how are we
going to monitor progress? How will we communicate among
the team and outside externally to the other stakeholders?
Who will be doing the reporting? How will we correct and take
action when something is not progressing as planned?

Reflect on some of your experiences executing a project in terms of

the questions above. Respond to the following questions:

1. What challenges have you experienced in executing a plan?

2. How did you overcome these challenges?
3. What recommendations do you have for others?

If you have not had any experience in executing a project, where

might you foresee some challenges given your current organization,
role, and/or department in doing so?

Click on the “Join the discussion” below. Read and respond to a few
of your fellow learners’ postings. Remember to ‘like’ posts that
resonate with you. After you complete your responses start
watching the videos focusing on the The Execution Phase.

4.4 Earned Value

In this video, Professor Grushka-Cockayne explains how to

use Earned Value Analysis to understand how things are
progressing on a project. Think about a project you have
recently been involved with.

Did you use Earned Value Analysis to determine the progress of the
project? Why or why not?

Reflect on what some of the challenges and benefits might be to

using this method.

For those of you that are interested in ‘practicing’ what you have
learned in this video, we invite you to take free the non-graded quiz
on Earned Value Analysis at the end of this week.
 We have recently started Agile ways of working and it is
proving to be useful. EG, there were tasks that were time critical the
team were able to drop everything on work on that alone meeting
the target. Each individual identified how much capacity they had to
help.

The agile planning I consider can be used for projects in ambiguous

environments because it allows the work to be divided into small
manageable legs, which I consider decreases the risk of losing time
and money since failures can be better detected. I like the process
of collaborative planning between clients and developers.
 
I do not have any experience of using agile approach for project
execution.
 
Agile is an approach which can be implemented in projects that
have an unlimited budget and time and unconstrained scope and
only wish to ensure quality product delivery.
 
Normally budget and time is limited but the scope is often fuzzy.
In an agile approach customers have an instantaneous view and
influence on what is delivered in a sprint. When time and budget is
up it might be that one has only a minimal viable (or non viable)
product.
For completion more time and budget might be needed.

Actually when one implements projects with a similar technology

the backlog planning can be pretty good so that at the end the
customer gets what he wants. I even saw projects that were far
ahead in time than planned.
 
Es una herramienta apropiada para ciertos tipos de proyectos.
Antes de usarla es necesario si puede o no funcionar para nuestro
proyecto
 
Would I have an interest in carrying out an Agile project?
At the beginning of this course a project was differentiated from a
process. But Agile as a methodology almost is a process.
I have never executed projects under the Agile terminology but I
have managed the production of 100’s of multimedia online lessons
in an Agile manner.
I did know what Agile was at the time when I managed the team to
produce this content, but everything we did was Agile in nature –
daily meetings, sprint reviews etc. So it is really interesting that a
small team who never heard of Agile actually produced content in
an Agile manner naturally.
I think the Agile methodology is very specific to software
development as stated and a specialised and dedicated team is
required to make it a success. It makes total sense to me and I
would use it again as it is very effective in producing product by
empowering the team.

It feels as though the agile project ideology would sit very well with
our business, even though our projects have long duration of five
years plus.
Elements of the projects could be tackled with a scrum approach. It
would be interesting to try, but we would need a scrum master.

Agile requires a team work despite the fact it is conducted

autonomy and it can be challenge to set up process to muster

#In business world we have to delivered what the customer/client

want and like and facts show those project always successful. I
believe that the advantages is more then the disadvantages of the
agile
1-quality 2- team work 3- customers satisfaction and process

The advantages of agile project management:

* Product quality improvement: These methodologies foster the
proactive approach of team members in the pursuit of product
excellence
* Increased customer satisfaction: The customer is more satisfied to
be involved and engaged throughout the development process.
* Increased motivation of workers: Self-managed work teams
facilitate the development of creative and innovative capacity
among its members.
* Collaborative work: The division of work by different teams and
roles together with the development of frequent meetings, allows a
better organization of work.
* Use of most relevant metrics: The metrics used to estimate
parameters such as time, cost, performance, etc.
* Greater control and predictability
*Cost reduction