ICT PROJECT MANAGEMENT

ICT Project Management

Project Management

Introduction

If you are a project manager dealing with what you perceive to be an unrealistic deadline, the first thing you will want to try is to discuss this with your manager and see if there are any factors that are driving the project deadline that you may not be aware of. Sometimes the person who tells you of the deadline seems like the bad person, but sees if you can understand what the motivation is. For instance, there may be a business driver that is driving the deadline. There may be some event occurring that this project needs to support. Or your project may be one of a number of initiatives that need to come together at a specific time. It does not necessarily make your challenge any easier, but you may find that by better understanding the reason for the deadline, you may have an easier time getting yourself and your team members motivated to try to achieve it. (Dennis, 2007, p. 125)On the other hand, if the deadlines seem arbitrary and are not the result of some other business driver, then you should find that out as well. Sometimes managers set arbitrary end dates just to provide what they consider to be stretch objectives. However, this can end up like the story of the boy who cried wolf. If your manager is not careful, there will be a time when there is a firm business justification for an aggressive end date, but no one will believe it. Once you understand the motivation for the deadline date, there are project management techniques that can be utilized to increase the chances of success and better manage expectations.

Discussion

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, p. 325)

How to Set a Project Schedule

The first step in this project management process consisted of breaking down large tasks into a number of smaller tasks, estimating the completion dates of those smaller tasks, and rolling those tasks up into estimates for larger tasks until you have a set of estimates for the entire project. The next step in the process is to actually determine the order in which these tasks are to be completed using ...