Week 8 Discussion Question

Project Background Staid and Sons company has 35 years experience in the construction industry with a good reputation in residential construction market. On a land owned by Jim Staid a development of a Township called Pleasant view project started involving the design and the erection of individual houses. The project is currently constructing their first house and project team discovers new risks that would adversely impact the project schedule and the team is also aware that the project is already behind schedule and over budget. There is also a request from the client to make a few changes to the layout and finishing of rooms. On preliminary analysis, the resources needed to perform the job are unavailable with in the project team plus the project sponsor asked that the additional scope to be added to the project. The measures and actions to be taken by the project manager to bring the project back on schedule and within budget: As stated by Nickson, D. & Siddons, S. that "a key factor in surviving project disasters is knowing what caused them in the first place" so the project manager should call for a meeting to take a close look to all the risks involved and who is responsible for the resulted delay and the budget over run and make a thorough investigation to determine the causes and come up with the proper recommendations to be implemented and addresses the implementation processes. Project manager should review the risk management plan and audit the existing monitoring and control process and the system in place which should allow the project team to deduct those risks in the beginning and correct it. According to Sanghera (2010) that after you identify the risks involved you need to make an assessment on what is the best way to deal with it and then monitor it and control it. With that in place your risk management plan can be updated whenever new risks appears during the monitoring process. Schedule delay: Project control planning group with construction team headed by the project manager should hold sessions to study the plan and analyse the actual work done vs. the planned work and identify where exactly the delay happened and the needed resources (manpower, materials, services contracts etc...) and actions needed to bring the schedule back on track and all of the recommendations and out puts of this meeting should be reported and given to top management for their review and approval. After getting the approval a monitoring and controlling process should be placed and implemented during a daily or weekly progress meeting.

Budget over run: Same as above a meeting should be held to analyze every cost overrun and assessment needs to be done to review the remaining budget vs. the remaining work and visit the contingency plan to back up the shortage. Considering the budget over run the new change order for the additional scope needs to be questioned why it was approved without going through the scope change approval procedure (Wysocki 2009 p.302) so new funds needs to be asked for the new scope change due to the fact that this additional scope was not considered in the original budget. And as described by Wysocki "If the scope change request is approved, the project scope, cost, schedule, resource requirements, and client acceptance criteria are updated." (Wysocki 2009 p.302) So all the amount of budget used from the contingency plan and the new funds for the new scope change should be updated In the PMP. We had a similar case where we had a schedule impact and we went through a similar process as above to identify where exactly the delay happened and mitigate it by bringing more manpower, working two shifts and expediting delayed material etc.. In order to catch up the plan and thanks God we managed to reduce the impact from 3 months delay to one month which was accepted by client and was with in their delay margin and daily monitoring and controlling was the key of successes. In conclusion Project manager should make sure that the monitoring and controlling process continues till the end of the project and also recommend the needed resources and the funds to implement the new scope change after fulfilling the scope change approval procedure requirement and in all situations PMP need to be updated in order to control the project.

References: 1. Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, 2009 Robert K. Wysocki Fifth Edition Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana 2. Lecture Notes https://elearning.uol.ohecampus.com/bbcswebdav/xid-134462_4 3. Nickson, D. & Siddons, S. (2006) Project management disasters: and how to survive them. London: Kogan Page, Limited. 4. PMP in Depth: Project Management Professional Study Guide for the PMP Exam, 2nd edition Paul Sanghera 2010 published by Course Technology Press (p.p. 198-218)