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Introduction

ARC Blue Zuma Project Project Management Plan Tarun Misra 5/5/2010 Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 Project Objective and Description 3 Items Excluded 3 Requirements 3 Deliverables 3 Project Priorities 3 Project Constraints 3 Project Assumptions 3 Key Stakeholders 3 Major Milestones 4 Communication Plan 5 Responsibility Matrix 5 Initial Schedule Planning 6 Initial Resource Planning 8 Revised Planning 10 Cost 12 Risk Management 16 Executive Summary The 'Blue Zuma' is the code name for a project to develop new razor scooter to meet the growing demand for racing scooters. The project is scheduled to start on 1/2/2008 and is constrained to finish on 2/1/2009, within an estimated budget of $1.3 million. During the initial schedule planning phase, the project was estimated to be completed by 12/22/2008, taking a total of 250 days to complete. There was only one critical path for this schedule and the non-critical activities had a significant amount of slack. Thus, the network was not very sensitive. The start of detailed product design and finish of finalized product design have been suggested as possible milestones for the project. However, since the project is resource constrained, adding resources to the schedule table led to the over-allocation of resources. The resources Marketing Specialist, Design Engineer, Industrial Engineer and purchasing agent were over-allocated, and activities that involved over-allocated resources were Product Design, Manufacturing Study, Detailed Marketing Plan, Manufacturing Process, Detailed Product Design, Order Components, Order Production Equipment and Install Production Equipment. ...read more.

Middle

We can see that the network is not very sensitive as there is only one critical path for the project. Also, the non-critical activities are having good slack with the minimum being 20 days for manufacturing study. This also contributes towards making the project less sensitive. As milestones, we would recommend the start of Detailed Product Design and finish of Finalized Product Design. These tasks are in the critical path of the project, and whereas detailed production design is a critical merge activity, finalized product design is a critical burst activity. Advantages and disadvantages of displaying the schedule as a network versus a Gantt chart are compared in tabular form below: Network Diagram Gantt chart Illustrate the relationship between critical path and different activities more clearly Relationship between critical path and different activities not as clear Precise information about activities displayed in each box Precise information about activities not displayed in an organized way Difficult to get a clear picture of the project in terms of activities across timelines. Provides a clear overview of the project across different activities and timelines Activities cannot be tracked as per the dates they are beginning on. Can be utilized to track activities as per the dates they are beginning on Figure 7: Comparison between Network Diagrams and Gantt chart Initial Resource Planning As we allocated the resources to various activities, there was a problem of over-allocation of resources. The resources Marketing Specialist, Design Engineer, Industrial Engineer and Purchasing Agent were over-allocated. ...read more.

Conclusion

There may be cases where important human resources leave the company amidst project, as has happened for plenty of projects during the past. Although this has a good chance of happening, the mitigation plan for this would be to ensure that knowledge is transferred from the leaving resources and the employees should be legally bound to serve a notice period, wherein the replacements should be ready to take over. Also, some inexperienced resources may not follow the quality standards that we have set during the development and documentation phases. To mitigate this risk, there should be constant quality control measures to ensure that such a lapse at one point in time is detected very early and not carried forward to much later stage. Similarly, during the Product design phase, product design selection phase, detailed product design phase etc., when more than one teams may have to collaborate with each other in order to produce the expected results, there may be a lack of communication across various teams which may make the project run behind schedule. It needs to be ensured that various tools are in place to communicate across teams to mitigate this risk. In addition to this, since the project is of huge magnitude, there is a risk of underestimating the number of resources required for this project. This risk can be mitigated by having sufficient backup of people with similar skillset within the organization. A detailed risk matrix is provided below. A detailed risk matrix is provided below. Figure 18: Risk Assessment Matrix, 'Blue Zuma' Project ?? ?? ?? ?? 17 | Page ...read more.

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