Effect of time management on projects

For every project,whether it is early start or late start, the time is money. This should be kept in the mind before starting the project. Project should not be started if you can not meet this requirement.

Industry focus on on-time services, not on the expenditure being done for those services. If you can do this then you are the winner else you will be listed in those failures who were claimed to become the best but due lack of project management approach they lost the battle.

Usually a question arise in mind of many people that why do we need project management and time management?

The answer is, to provide effective and on-time solution we need time management and project management.

Now the question arises why some project face failure if they were started with the approach of project management?

Project management has certain activities listed below:
Requirement collection
Requirement elucitation
Planning
Designing
Execution

If i write these in short words it will be:
Requirement phase
Planning
Execution

All the three activities are interconnected and if there is any difference between any interconnected activity, it will lead the project towards failure. Not a single practice adopted by any team to hold this situation if it is not viewed microscopically. If sales team give wrong data to technical team then it will create a huge difference for the development team because they better know the relation between technology and client's requirement.

Project Management in practice with requirement gathering

In my last post i discussed about how to convert a scratch start into a quality project, if not read please click
 How to convert a scratch start into quality project
Now i am taking an example which will tell how to implement it:

I am taking this example for software industry and taking Waterfall SDLC model for it. Waterfall model has few steps such as Feasibility study, requirement analysis, system design, coding, testing, maintenance. Today i will discuss the use of requirement study.

Before starting any project please be ensure what is the need.(Here i am assuming that we have done feasibility study). Now the question arises how to find out what is the need?

We need to ask a set of question to our customer to find out the actual need. But what if the customer is not aware about the existing system and limitation of the technology. Here our feasibility study will help us.

Now on the basis of that we will set some question in which we will put the features of existing system. We will take another sheet with us in which we will note down the customer's need and try to find out the need. Then after we will be able to plot a suitable system design.

To choose technology is also the important task for us. Reason for this is the process of knowledge transfer. If we have trained employee for the requirement of customer then it's fine but always it's not true. Sometimes we have to stuck with less technology knowledge. Always do time and cost analysis for the project. If we say in layman's language then cost is direct proportional to time. Time will increase then cost will increase.

Technology selection is also based market research by sales and marketing team. Let suppose if we have a target cluster of 100 users and it's not more than that, and we are developing an application which will be able to serve 1 million people. It will impose a cost increase on the project. So analysis should be done keeping these factors in the mind.

Please give feedback if information is not sufficient or if you were looking for something else.

How to convert a scratch start into quality project

Everyone wants to make quality projects, but some of them successful in this task.Why?
Answer is below with certain questions.
How do we plan our project from scratch to end?
Before starting a project we should do a proper paper work. Because on the basis of memory we can't run our project efficiently. The strong paper work done will convert your project in reality.
Do we have sufficient information related to our project?
We should have sufficient information to start our project. Before initializing anything we should do proper field work of the existing or related systems. So that we would be able to know what we are going to make.
Do we have proper resources?
It's better to say no for a project if we don't have proper resource. It can increase the time and cost of the project. These resources include our technical resources.
Do we have proper modular structure for our project?
Before starting a project we should divide it into modules. And of these modules we should be able to find the critical modules. By the means of critical module is, modules which can affect the completion of the project. Critical modules should be worked first. If anything in the project which you don't know how to deal that should be kept into critical module and should be worked first.



Soon i will be posting how to use project management in the practice. With some real world examples and case studies.