ASSIGNMENT 2: MS PROJECT AND TEAM LEADERSHIP

MS Project and Team Leadership



Assignment 2: MS Project and Team Leadership

Work Breakdown Structure in MS Project

TASKS

WEEKS

1

3

5

7

9

11

13

15

17

Project proposal

Approval of proposal

Designing Project charter

Approval of project charter

Implementation of the project

Check/Revision

Approval from board of directors

2. Memo

To the Project Team

Dated: __________

No project is perfect. Our project costs are exceeding the established budget. Problems occur because of inaccurate milestone predictions, budget allocations, schedule delays, new technology demands, additional requirements unanticipated during initial planning and changes in project mission. Management hates surprises and any of these situations can cause disaster during the life of a project.Regularly monitor costs throughout the project so that you are aware of any potential cost overruns as soon as possible.

The key to avoiding the "impending doom" scenario is to track the project process carefully and provide management more frequent status reports. With available project analysis tools on the market, project managers can predict more objective analysis of the problem to present to management. Once project managers have composed a plan, review it weekly, if not nightly, against the team's actual performance. Use schedules and budgets as tools. Day-to-day changes in deadlines, expenditures and revenues cannot be ignored. With regular and timely assessment, it is possible to reflect this constantly changing reality and to keep management regularly informed.

Ways to dal with the deadline

Is it easier to provide comfortably specific answers for the first or second set of questions? Most honest people would say that it's almost impossible to give an accurate answer to the question, whereas it's much more feasible to provide some reasonable answers for the second group of questions. Thus if you actually had to build a project based off of these estimates, you could use the sum of all of the times required for each small task to determine how long it will take you and your team to accomplish a much larger task. And that's where this project management process begins-by using mind maps to take a project and break down its tasks into smaller, more specific tasks which you can more easily estimate and roll up into a more accurate delivery deadline for the project as a whole. (Martin, 2002)

In many projects, you might get a little behind but have confidence that you can make up the time later. However, when you start a project with the deadline at risk, be sure to manage the work plan diligently. You have no margin for error. If early due dates start to slip, you are going to be in trouble early. As you monitor the work plan, treat missed deadlines as issues and work hard to solve the reasons behind the slippage. Again, get your team, management and clients involved. If your clients are causing delays, get more accountability from your business managers for helping to resolve project resource problems. Again, if the problem cannot be resolved perfectly, at least you are continuing to manage expectations. (Paul, 2005)

Lastly, take an honest look at your work plan and your approach for executing the ...