1) HR systems are not ones that can afford to go down.
2) What happens if just one of the triple constraint variables (cost, time, or scope) of a project changes? What would happen to the other two variables? Share an experience in your personal or business experience where one variable changed. What happened to the other two? How did things turn out? Why?
3) Why are the Project Charter and Project Scope Statement artifacts critical to the success of a project? Describe some of the key elements of these artifacts.
4) In the practical side of project management, a scope statement is often created a little different than in the above explanation. When starting to create a scope statement, one must remember that it is arguably the most important single document created on a project. Without a complete, through scope statement, one chances of success on the project are not very good. Each section of a practitioner based scope statement will be described below.
· Project Scope/Product Scope description: In this section of the scope statement, we elaborate on what specifically the project will create. One should also discuss here how the project team plans of accomplishing this project. This section should be quite detailed, as it creates the basis for the entire rest of the project. This section should be based on information found in the project’s charter.
· Deliverables: As stated earlier, deliverables are tangible items or services created for this project. These are generally big picture items. For example, if the project was to build a shopping mall, foundation, walls, roof, and parking lot might be examples of deliverables.
· Project Acceptance Criteria: Project acceptance criteria are the criteria the customer will use to judge whether the project was successful or not. What must this project create for the sponsor or customer to be satisfied with the results?
· Inclusions and Exclusions: What is included in the project and what is not included in the project? Back to our example of a shopping mall. Is the layout of each individual store part of the project, or is that the responsibility of the soon to be tenant? These inclusions and exclusions set the boundaries for the project manager to operate within.
· Project Assumptions: Project assumptions are those things we believe to be true without proof for planning purposes. For our mall, we could assume all the material we need to build the mall will be available when we need them. We have no way to know this for sure during project planning, thus it is an assumption.
· Project Constraints: Project constraints are limitations placed upon the project. Many of these are placed by individuals outside of the project. Let’s say we are only given a budget of $5 million dollars to build our mall. That $5 million dollars is a constraint to the project, as we have no more money than that to complete the project.
Notice milestones are not included in this list? From a practitioner point of view, milestones are found in the charter, not in the scope. If these milestones were modified from those in the charter, the new milestones may appear in the scope statement; however, if they were not modified, they are not normally found in the scope statement.
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Without a solid scope statement, what are the chances of success on the project? Why? Please share an example from your experience where a project struggled without a solid scope statement. Why did this happen?
5) assume you were appointed as project manager to lead a dozen of your classmates to write up an end-of-course summary guide that would be used to update all areas of the course (i.e. discussion questions, lectures, assignments, quizzes, and exams). You plan to form sub-teams to work each of these elements, each headed by a sub-team leader. How would you setup your WBS? What are some considerations you made when you decided on this structure?
6) The steps to building a WBS are as follows:
1. Start with the scope statement of the project.
2. Decompose the scope into work packages that develop the deliverables.
3. Arrange the work packages without regard to timing or dependencies.
4. Tabulate and indent work packages according to granularity level.
Are any steps missing? If so, which ones?
What might happen if you were to miss a critical step in the WBS? Share an experience (if possible) where a critical step was missed.