Safety Project Management Project Management

Safety Project Management

Project management is a task that is common to all forms of development management and needs to be applied when there is development of any organization. There is really no difference between managing projects of any type as they are all required for the development of the organization and all have to be completed within a certain pre-determined period of time.

Project management is the task of seeing to it that the projects are completed in time. Like all other organizational activities, it is natural that there will be difficulties in the completion of projects in time, and some individuals in the organization have to take up the responsibility for finishing the job in time, and they are the project managers. Sometimes, they are from within the organization, while others may be appointed for a specific project or contract, when the project is being completed by an outside party. In the analysis here, the objective is to judge certain techniques that are often used for finishing the project as per the requirements of the organization. Remember that it is the organization for which the project is being done that will have to pay the bill for the project and thus they are the clients, and it is their preferences that will determine the method of handling the project. The first aspect that we shall look at is the advantages and disadvantages of activity crashing for managing projects.

Activity Crashing:

There are simple methods of representing the relationship between the cost and duration of activities involved in projects, and a simplistic view can be represented as shown in figure 1. However such relationships exists for all activities involved in the project, and if the activity duration did not have any relationship to the total project, then an ideal management solution would be to choose a process which would involve the lowest cost. This is not practical to adopt since if this method is adopted for all concerned activities, then it is likely that the project will take a very long time for completion and thus involve the organization completing the project with major penalties. This type of a wrong solution for the project is called sub-optimization. This means that one activity of a project is optimized and as a result of which the total project looses its optimization. This is a problem which project managers have to face many times, and a solution which is often adopted to get rid of this problem is to try and complete all activities in the minimum possible time. This naturally increases the cost and the time involved is called the activity crash time. (Advanced Scheduling Techniques)

In the figure shown below, both these ends of the cost and activity speed are shown. The linear or curvilinear relationship that may exist between these two points, minimum cost point and minimum time point, would also provide for solutions in between these two extremes. These also may be chosen for completion of the activity, and may be the ideal time-cost point for doing the activity. The reason for increases in costs is due to the use of overtime work and other methods which are expensive. It would be required to schedule weekend or overtime work, and this would reduce the number of calendar days for completing the work. The other aspect is that overtime work is more prone to accidents and quality problems which would lead to more costs. (Advanced Scheduling Techniques)

Figure 1: Illustration of a Linear Time/Cost Tradeoff for an Activity

However the minimum time to complete a project is called the project crash time. To find this minimum time for completion, the method would be to apply critical path scheduling with all activity durations set to their minimum values. For the project crash time to be achieved, the cost that would be required is called the project crash cost. Here is should be understood that this cost is not determined by fixing each activity at its crash duration and adding up the concerned costs. That total of costs would be the all crash cost. Since many activities of the projects are not on the critical path, these can be provided additional time, and that would not delay the project, that would make it possible to provide these activities more time, and thus reduce costs. (Advanced Scheduling Techniques)

Project duration estimates:

The definition of project durations is very confusing, and the first difficulty comes from understanding what is meant by the duration. If it is said that the duration of a project is three months the first question in understanding is whether that means 90 days or 60 work days. This is the reason why it is often defined in terms of the end of project date, and then the project duration is clear to every body. The assumptions have to be based on individuals on the project working eight hours per day, and being absolutely productive all the time, then duration can be easily calculated by finding out the total numbers of work hours required for the project, dividing it by the number of people to be employed, and then by eight to get the total number of days required for completion of the job. Yet this is not how people work and the first step in the calculation is to assume a lower number of effective working hours for individuals in a working day and the figure may be around six or six and a half. This will take into account sick time, departmental meetings, administrative activities, going to the bathroom etc. (Project Management Tips and Techniques Estimating Duration and Cost)

Then the consideration is of how many resources are going to be applied to each activity, but having more people on the job do not mean that the job will be finished in half the time, and there is a point beyond which if more resources are added, the job will only end up taking more time. Then the available workdays have to be added in and this involves considerations of holidays, vacations and trainings. The third point to be considered is that all resources will not be available all the time, and this factor of availability of the resource will have to be considered in deciding on project durations. For these part time resources, there will also be further loss of time as the resource has to stop one activity and can only start on the other activity after that time. The fourth point to be considered is the delays and lag times. These may take place due to the time taken by the resource to start on the job and that may be vendor supplied resources, or even approvals that are required to begin on the job. Only after this is consideration of activities that can be done simultaneously, and this should be used to compress the project schedule. Here again difficulties may arise as the needed skills may not be available. Finally it is important to document all plans, and along with all estimates of project duration, there has to be a statement of all assumptions that have been made. (Project Management Tips and Techniques Estimating Duration and Cost)

Thus one can see that project duration estimates depend on the durations that individual activities will take; the amount of compression of time that has been planned for particular activities and the appropriate availability of resources for the activity. However, even with all planning, there are situations where many activities run into common problems and it is the responsibility of the executing authority to decide the priority with which the common problems will be resolved. At the same time, there are different methods of scheduling of activities and they can be resource oriented or time oriented in the scheduling techniques. In the first case, while some resources are used efficiently, like a cranes being used for constructing buildings, other resources like delivery trucks may not be used efficiently and have to wait in a queue or the workers in the construction area for materials. For time oriented scheduling, it is important to finish the job within a fixed schedule, and there the resources may not be so effectively utilized. To determine the optimum path, critical path scheduling often involves a resource constraint on the activity following a precedence relation placed by the planners. (Fundamental Scheduling Procedures)

Practical working on jobs:

All this is fine in theory, but no contractor can get a job to do unless the person has enough references to get a chance to the job. For applying for any contract, these details generally have to be filled up in particular formats. Apart from this, the organizational formats have to be clear for the supplying organization, their financial relationships with others whom they will use have to be clarified and generally it is preferred that they have all in house personnel. (Digital Key Telephone System: Amended per Addendum 1) Considering the fact that the supplying organization is generally a much smaller organization than the organization that is employing them to do the work, these are often not really implemented in practice.

Utilizing contract employees for a project vs. loaned internal company employees:

This is a very difficult question to answer directly, and the biggest advantage of using loaned internal companies is that their loyalty to the company can never be questioned, but they cannot have the same sense of urgency which an outside contract employee will have. The benefits of external contract employees are in terms of being charged only for actual hours; even if the company has a hiring freeze, staff may be increased; the responsibility for getting suitable candidates is with the contract service company; the method is quick and convenient for increasing or decreasing staff; contract workers know that they are employed on a temporary basis and so accept their removal without any prejudice and this is an excellent resource to a wide range of proven and experienced talent. (Positive Values of Utilizing Contract Employees)