Assignment 1st

Name: Bipul Maharjan

Year: Fourth

Sec: A

A13019/A017300-13

Subject: Project management

Submitted to: Mr. Ramesh Raj Ghimire

Explain some situations when project management is not applicable.

Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing
the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria Project
management involves planning and organization of a company's resources to move a specific
task, event or duty toward completion. It typically involves a one-time project rather than an
ongoing activity, and resources managed include human capital and financial capital. A project
manager helps to define the goals and objectives of the project and determines when the various
project components are to be completed and by whom; he also creates quality control checks to
ensure completed components meet a certain standard.

Some of the characteristics of projects are:

novelty,
complexity,
multiple tasks,
inter-dependencies,
deadlines,
constraints,
resource
budget limitations,
outputs and outcomes.

There can be many situation where Project management can be hard to be applied or effective.

Some of the cases might be

No Communication
No Understanding
No Collaboration
No Skilled Resources
Fake Budgeting
Fake Timeline
Dis-balance of 4 constraints (Cost, Time, Scope and Quality)

In the above mentioned situation it can be hard to apply project management effectively or
even impossible to start and complete project.
Lets look at some of the situation:

1. In situations where there is a high level of uncertainty that calls for a more Agile and
adaptive approach. In many areas such as software development, a traditional plan-
driven approach to project management is being replaced by more of an Agile Project
Management approach that is better suited for a more uncertain environment.
2. Situations where there is significant value uncertainty, i.e. uncertainty over whether
something should be built or what features it should have, because it is a new thing and
there are unknowns about the extent to which customers will like / value it. Project
management is good at locking down and controlling scope, but if you have value
uncertainty it is a bad idea to lock down and control your scope. You want to be able to
change it as you gather learning.

3. Project management will not be effective in a culture with weak accountability. When a
company has weak accountability, work becomes an activity, rather than action being
done to achieve a goal. When work is an activity, people come to work and do things, but
if they are not accountable for things to be done (either by a certain time or a by a certain
spec) then they have coffee, take some time to read the news, check personal email, get
Pandora going in the headphones.

4. Project management is about having goals and achieving them. Projects can be easy or
difficult. But, in any case, if a companys not got a culture of getting stuff done, or
moving the ball down the field, then not much need for a project manager to help you
focus on the goal, measure progress towards the goal, get resources to support the goal,
etc.
In addition to the above situations , let me add these two circumstances for which PM may not be
the best fit.

1. When an adaptive process may be better. Example: marketing campaigns to launch a

new product. These fit the general criteria for a project (defined beginning/end; a
change is being made, in this case, in the product line; multiple resources are
consumed and require coordination, etc.). From a higher level, though, it can look like
a repeatable process that has some relatively similar types of variations. So if the scale
exists that such undertakings are continuous, a process approach which embeds some
useful PM disciplines may be as or more effective. PM may be more effective if
product launches are infrequent and skew more towards unique events.

2. When a high velocity change is being driven towards you, not by you. Example:
emergency response towards an unexpected product failure that is highly visible and
requires fast action. In such cases, the pace of events overwhelms most project
processes so a different set of disciplines is required until the situation can be stabilized
to the point you can define and execute a plan to closure that is not out of date before it
can even be acted upon.