Name Anil Kumar Joshi

Roll No. 520949950

Course & Semester MBA Semester – II

Subject Name & Code PROJECT MANAGEMENT – MB0033

Assignment No. Set – 2

LC name & Code NIPSTec LTD. 1640

Date of Submission

Session FEB – 2010 (Spring 2010)

Q1. Examine briefly the seven steps of performance management of
projects

Ans. Performance Management – The professional manager not only ensures

that his performance is at peak all times, but motivates his entire team to do it.
This comes by appreciation and encouragement. If there any shortfalls he
arranges for training them so that their performance improves. Thus the team
members know that they are expected to perform, that they get help to do so and
their effort is recognized. This is the simple path of performance management.
The following seven step model will be useful:

1. Objectives/Performance standards are set.

2. These are communicated to the employees.
3. Review/monitor the above.
4. Check actual performance Vs. Standards set.
5. Identify gaps.
6. Jointly decide on corrective action, if needed.
7. Reset objectives for next period

1. Objectives/Performance Standards Are Set

1. To mange any criterion, it is necessary to measure the factors that were

responsible for ‘what is’. The quality of the input, their quantity and their intended
usage. Then measures of the utilization- the processes used, their suitability, and
the difficulties faced in utilization and how they were resolved. Then the
outcomes – are they as they were expected. Performance closer or beyond
expectation is the degree of quality. For every employee the level of achievement
is set in terms of quantities and extent to which the performance approached the
standard. This is the basis for evaluating performance.

2. These are communicated to the employees – This procedure ensures that

they know what is expected of them and help them to adjust their activities in
such a way as to meet them. This enables them to seek help, consult their
colleagues or bosses, and learn– so that they will meet the expectations. It is
possible that some objectives cannot be met at all. The communication to his
boss, may help in reallocating the job, so that there will be no hiccups at the end
of the period.

3. Review/monitor the above – Review helps in resetting the goals when they
cannot be achieved for various reasons – shortage of resources, time etc.
By monitoring, the shortfalls can be made up with the allocation of extra
resources, or even diverting the operation.
4. Check actual performance Vs. Standards set – This is the evaluation phase.
Comparison on every detail is made. Differences are recorded. Particular
areas are chosen for improvement.

5. Identify gaps – Gaps mean the shortfall in performance standards. The

immediate supervisor is also involved. The extent to which they affect the
functions of the job itself are identified

6. Jointly decide on corrective action, if needed – There is a possibility that the

performance has exceeded the set standards. But if performance is not
good – the reasons and extent having been identified, the course of action
for effecting corrections are decided. Giving extra responsibilities, training,
relocation is considered.

7. Reset objectives for next period – The targets are revised either upward or
downward depending on the conclusion of the appraisal process.

Identification with the organisation – A sense of pride and belonging goes with
the “ownership” of the job, the project, team members and organisation. This is
brought about by the culture and communication system in the organisation.
Information sharing brings in trust and promotes belongingness. The tendency
seen is that most managers strongly identify with their own departments, units or
divisions and they lack a sense of organisation.

In the light of increased competition and ever changing strategies to develop

business orientation, which in effect means every manager should be aware of
the company’s plans, products and policies. An obvious corollary to this is that
the organization’s communication policy too should be conducive to such
information sharing. Today, many organizations are using interventions such as
team building, survey feedback, and other activities, to ensure that employees
build up a strong sense of identity and pride in the organisation they work for.

Empowering employees: The professional manager should possess the ability to

empower his employees down the line. Many managers are not even ready to
delegate their authority to subordinates and end up only delegating responsibility.
Empowerment is the process by which employees are encouraged to take
decisions pertaining to their area of work. Empowerment ensures execution of
his duties. This leads employees developing a sense of pride in their jobs. But
managers often hesitate to empower their subordinates as they feel insecure and
show a sense of uncertainty. The professional manager practices empowerment
and encourages employees to grow and develop in their positions.

Coping with changes: It is often said – ‘The only constant in this world is
change’. A professional manager has the ability and capacity to cope with
change. He accepts the fact that change is inevitable and is ready to implement
change at the workplace. To implement change successfully, it is essential that
employees are involved in the implementation of change. Further the positive
and negative consequences of change need to be discussed and understood
before implementation. Thus a professional manager has the attitude to accept
change as a way of life and takes it in his stride
Q2. Is substitution necessary?

Ans. Technology Substitution

Technology substitution is based on the fact that several alternate technological

routes are available to create a particular device. These alternate routes are
normally hidden behind the commonly known processes, in different forms.
Identification of these hidden technologies will open up opportunities for
technology substitution. Some of the examples of technology substitution are in
the fields of Aerospace, Automobile, water storage dams, etc. We give just two
examples from the aerospace industry. In recent years, because of the versatility
of software programmes which can be written to simulate a variety of operating
conditions, a great amount of work is going on – both in terms of variety and
depth.

(a) Substitution of experimentation – Tests is conducted to certify the

performance parameters of Aerospace Systems Wind tunnel testing has been
conducted for a long time. In this process wind is blows at speeds at which the
aircraft is expected to be flying, and the aircraft engine, wings, tails and other
parts the simulation is conducted and readings recorded for analyses. Now with
the use of computer systems this costly procedure can be substituted by
Computational Fluid Dynamics. The flight testing can be greatly reduced by the
use of digital and hardware – in – loop simulation.

(b) Substitution or enhancement of Hardware with Software – for example, in the

case of an Inertial Navigation System, the Gyro Stabilized Platforms can be
replaced by the strap down systems using On-Board computer and software
improving the accuracy of navigation systems.

In the same way, a wide variety of subsystems for commercial and industrial
uses have many components which are used by the manufacturing
organizations. It is well known that many of them find military applications and
are made especially for them. However, these are superior than those used for
industrial purposes for obvious reasons. With some minor improvements they
can be used for superior performance when such requirement can bear a little
higher cost.
Q3. In what ways can an ERP package be utilized? Explain

Ans:- The Role of Effective Data Management in the Success of Project

Management:

Data management consists in conducting activities which facilitate in acquiring

data, processing it and distributing it. Acquisition of data is the primary function.
Data to be useful should have three important characteristics – relevancy,
sufficiency and timeliness. Management of acquisition lies in ensuring that these
are satisfied – before they are stored for processing and decisions taken on the
analyses. We will have data about customers, suppliers, market conditions, new
technology, opportunities, human resources, economic activities, government
regulations, political upheavals, – all of which affect the way we function. Most of
the data go on changing because the aforesaid sources have uncertainty
inherent in them. So updating data is a very important aspect of their
management.

Storing what is relevant in a form that is available to concerned persons is also

important. When a project is underway dataflow from all members of the team
will be flowing with the progress of activities, shortfalls they are suffering from
seeking instructions, reporting on actions taken them. He will have to analyse
them, discover further data from other sources and see how he can use them
and take decisions. Many times he will have to inform and seek sanction from top
management. The management will have to study the impact on the overall
organizational goals and strategies and convey their decisions to thee manager
for implementation. The appropriateness of decisions taken given a set of
circumstances and data form the knowledge base for the organisation. BOM –
Bill of Materials is a very important document in Project Management.

It contains details about all materials that go into the project at various stages
and has to be continuously updated as all members of the project depend upon it
for providing materials for their apportioned areas of execution. Since information
is shared by all members, there is an opportunity for utilizing some of them when
others do not need them. To ascertain availability at some future point of time,
information about orders placed, backlogs, lead times are important for all the
members. A proper MIS will take care of all these aspects. ERP packages help in
integrating data from all sources and present them to individual members in the
way they require. When all these are done efficiently the project will have no hold
ups an assure success.
Q4. How is a risk analysis done?

Ans:- Learning Objective-2 : Analyze The Risk And The Steps Necessary To
Manage The Risks

Risk Analysis
The first step in risk analysis is to make each risk item more specific. Risks such
as, “Lack of Management buy-in,” and “people might leave,” are a little
ambiguous. In these cases the group might decide to split the risk into smaller
specific risks, such as, “manager Jane decides that the project is not beneficial,”
“Database expert might leave,” and “Webmaster might get pulled off the project.”

The next step is to set priorities and determine where to focus risk mitigation
efforts. Some of the identified risks are unlikely to occur, and others might not be
serious enough to worry about. During the analysis, discuss with the team
members, each risk item to understand how devastating it would be if it did
occur, and how likely it is to occur. For example, if you had a risk of a key person
leaving, you might decide that it would have a large impact on the project, but
that it is not very likely.

In the process below, we have the group agree on how likely it thinks each risk
item is to occur, using a simple scale from 1 to 10 (where 1 is very unlikely and
10 is very likely). The group then rates how serious the impact would be if the
risk did occur, using a simple scale from 1 to 10 (where 1 is little impact and 10 is
very large). To use this numbering scheme, first pick out the items that rate 1 and
10, respectively. Then rate the other items relative to these boundaries. To
determine the priority of each risk item, calculate the product of the two values,
likelihood and impact. This priority scheme helps push the big risks to the top of
the list, and the small risks to the bottom. It is a usual practice to analyze risk
either by sensitivity analysis or by probabilistic analysis.

In sensitivity analysis a study is done to analyse the changes in the variable

values because of a change in one or more of the decision criteria.

In the probability analysis, the frequency of a particular event occurring is

determined, based on which it average weighted average value is calculated.

Each outcome of an event resulting in a risk situation in a risk analysis process is

expressed as a probability. Risk analysis can be performed by calculating the
expected value of each alternative and selecting the best alternative.

Ex : Now that the group has assigned a priority to each risk, it is ready to select
the items to mange. Some projects select a subset to take action upon, while
others choose to work on all of the items. To get started, you might select the top
3 risks, or the top 20%, based on the priority calculation.
Learning Objective-3 : To Understand The Processes Needed To Review A Risk
Situation And The Risk And Its Causes

Risk Management Planning

There are two things one can do to manage risk. The first is to take action to
reduce (or partially reduce) the likelihood of the risk occurring. For example,
some project that work on process improvement make their deadlines earlier and
increases their efforts to minimize the likelihood of team members being pulled
off the project due to changing organizational priorities. In a software product, a
critical feature might be developed first and tested early.

Second, we can take action to reduce the impact if the risk does occur.
Sometimes this is an action taken prior to the crisis, such as the creation of a
simulator to use for testing if the hardware is late. At other times, it is a simple
backup plan, such as running a night shift to share hardware.

For the potential loss of a key person, for example, we might do two things:

Plan to reduce the impact by making sure other people become familiar with that
person’s work, or reduce the likelihood of attrition by giving the person a raise, or
by providing day-care.
Q5. Why is support software required in project management process?
Explain some of them

Ans:- Support Software

Having learnt the basics of Application software, students would have a fair idea
of how & to what extent PM Processes could be automated. However, the
challenge of “making things work” remains unchanged. While Software Vendors
are confident of “making it work”, two yawning gaps still remain – Business
Processes which are not covered in such Software & Integration of Multi vendor
supported software applications.

The Enterprise is normally in a dilemma – whether to look at the same vendors to

support such customization or not. This normally works out too expensive for
their comfort or within their tight budgets. Several Software Vendors have seized
the opportunity with offerings that substantially fill these gaps effectively at a
fraction of the costs quoted by the major vendors. The other carrot which these
vendors offer is a unilateral transfer of the facility to customize them which is
seen as a huge advantage. The various support software that may be used for
managing projects are:

ARROW

FEDORA

VITAL

PILIN

MS EXCHANGE SERVER 2003

The ARROW Project

It is a consortia of institutional repository solution, combining Open source and

proprietary Software

Why did we want a repository?

Provides a platform for promoting research output in the ARROW context,

Safeguards digital information, Gathers an institution’s research output into one
place, Provides consistent ways of finding similar objects, allows information to
be preserved over the long term, allows information from many repositories to be
gathered and searched in one step, enables resources to be shared, while
respecting access constraints (when software allows access controls), enables
effective communication and collaboration between researchers

The project ARROW?

“The ARROW project will identify and test software or solutions to support best
practice institutional digital repositories comprising e-prints, digital theses and
electronic publishing.”

What did the ARROW project set out to achieve?

It provides solution for storing any digital output. Their Initial focus was on print
equivalents – thesis, journal articles, etc. It provided solution that could offer on-
going technical support and development past the end of the funding period of
the project.

What is ARROW now?

A development project Combining Open Source and proprietary software:
Fedora, VITAL, Open Journal Services (OJS). It is NOT a centralized or hosting
solution. Every member has their own hardware and software

Why Fedora?
ARROW wanted a robust, well architected underlying platform, a flexible object-
oriented data model to be able to have persistent identifiers down to the level of
individual data streams. It accommodates the content model to be able to be
version independent.

ARROW and Fedora

Since the beginning of the project ARROW has worked actively and closely with
Fedora and the Fedora Community, ARROW project Technical Architect is a
member of Fedora Advisory Board. ARROW Project Technical Architect sits on
Fedora Development Group

This is reinforced by VTLS Inc. VTLS President is a member of Fedora Advisory

Board and VITAL Lead Developer sits on Fedora Development Group

VITAL
What is VITAL?

ARROW specified software created and fully supported by VTLS Inc. built on top
of Fedora that currently provides:

• VITAL Manager
• VITAL Portal
• VITAL Access Portal
• VALET – Web Self-Submission Tool
• Batch Loader Tool
• Handles Server (CNRI)
 • Google Indexing and Exposure
• SRU / SRW Support
• VITAL architecture overview

Creative development of ARROW institutional repositories

• Inclusion of multimedia and creative works produced in Australian
universities.
• To date have had limited exposure nationally or internationally.
• Addition of annotation capability
• Inclusion of datasets and other research output not easily provided in any
other publishing channel.
• In conjunction with the DART (ARCHER) Project.
• Exploration of the research-teaching nexus tools that will allow value
added services for repositories.
• Integration with or development of new tools that will allow value added
services for repositories.
• For instance the creation of e-portfolios or CVs of research output of
individual academics.

PILIN – Persistent Identifiers and Linking Infrastructure

Growing realization that sustainable identifier infrastructure is required to deal
with the vast amount of digital assets being produced and stored within
universities. PILIN is a particular challenge for e-research communities where
massive amounts of data are being generated without any means of managing
this data over any length of time. The broad objectives are to:

1. Support adoption and use of persistent identifiers and shared persistent

identifier management services by the project stakeholders.
2. Plan for a sustainable, share identifier management infrastructure that
enables persistence of identifiers and associated services over archival
lengths of time
3. Deploying a Worldwide Site Consolidation Solution for Exchange Server
2003 at Microsoft
4. Picture
5. Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to consolidate more than 70
messaging sites worldwide into seven physical locations

Microsoft Model Enterprises (MME)

Objectives

• Maximizing the number of management tasks performed centrally

• Decrease the number of sites through the consolidation of the smaller
locations into a smaller number of RDCs
• Reducing the total number of infrastructure and application servers
 • Standardizing infrastructure and devices worldwide

Solution

• Consolidation of 75 tail sites into 6 regional data centers (RDCs) using

local storage area networks (SANs)
• Key Focus Areas
• Proactive, detailed monitoring and analysis of WAN bandwidth utilization
and latency
• Effective but flexible approach to project planning, scheduling, and cross-
group coordination
• Coordination and control of deployment of successive pre-release
versions of Office System 2003 (including Outlook 2003)

Business Benefits

• Four percent overall direct cost savings

• Key enabler of the Microsoft ME initiative which through fiscal year 2003
has produced USD $23.2 million in overall consolidation savings including
USE

IT Benefits

• Improved server utilization

• Improved server management
• Strengthened security
• Increased reliability.
Q6. Show your understanding of the use of MS project software

Ans-

Project Management using Software

The Microsoft Project family of products offers tools to work on a Project from
management point of view. Microsoft Project is designed for people who manage
projects independently and don’t require the capability to manage resources from
a central repository. Microsoft has a team project management solution that
enables project managers and their teams to collaborate on projects.

After creating a fairly complete final project plan it is a good idea to create a
baseline to compare the original project plan with actual events and
achievements.

Reviewing the Baseline

The Baseline created can be used to compare the original project plan with
actual events and achievements. This will display the days required for each task
and project phase. For actual operating instruction please refer the Microsoft
Project User Handbook.

Tracking Progress
After creating a baseline, if the project has begun, it is necessary to enter actual
dates that tasks are being completed and the resource utilization used to
complete them. Again review different views and the cost and summary tables
before proceeding to the next section. Return to the Entry view of the Gantt chart
before proceeding.

Balancing Workloads
At times people and equipment can become assigned more work than they can
complete in normal working hours. This is called over allocation. Project can test
for this condition and reschedule (or level) their workload to accommodate
completing tasks during a normal day.

Monitoring Variances
After a baseline has been established and the project has begun, it is desirable
to determine if tasks are being accomplished on time and /or if cost over runs are
occurring.

Creating Reports
Project has many different built-in reports and has the capability building custom
reports and exporting data to other MS Office applications for integration into
other reporting venues.