3.1 Introduction Communication on project work is the glue that holds everything together! (Young 1998) The success of a project is principally determined by its stakeholders, including sponsors and project team, and you can only know how you are doing by keeping channels of communication open. In this section, we examine briefly some of the issues involved in communicating with all people involved with the
2.5 Project meetings schedule You need to decide early on what meetings are essential to the monitoring process. All your stakeholders will expect to receive reports at regular intervals, whether formally or informally. So you need to ask yourself: Who needs to be informed? About what? How often? By what means? Effective communication involves giving information, collecting information and listening to people. To ensure the
1.3 Motivating and preparing staff Motivation is important. In resourcing the project it may be worthwhile to build in a reward system that helps to motivate. This depends on the availability of the resources to make this possible. Even if the material rewards are good, the conditions in which staff work and the relationships between them always affect performance. A project manager is often able to influence conditions and culture. The tasks allocated to staff must be realistic and achievable, and it is helpful to agree these
Introduction The focus of this unit is on implementing a project. The first part considers how the activities of a project start. Although planning and action run side by side, it is often difficult to initiate action to progress the first tasks. Once things start to happen, the project enters a new stage. Management of the project changes, from stimulating the initial action to monitoring and reviewing it in order to control the project's progress. Control systems are essential in managing a project of a
2.2.2 Mass production In many industries, craft manufacturing began to be replaced by mass production in the 19th century. Mass production involves producing goods in high volume with low variety – the opposite of craft manufacturing. Customers are expected to buy what is supplied, rather than goods made to their own specifications. Producers concentrated on keeping costs, and hence prices, down by minimising the variety of both components and products and setting up large production runs. They developed aggress
2.7 Multiple-cause diagrams As a general rule, an event or outcome will have more than one cause. A multiple-cause diagram will enable you to show the causes and the ways in which they are connected. Suppose, for example, that you were asked to explain why a work group was under-performing. You could use a multiple-cause diagram both to help you to construct the explanation and to present it. 2.6 Mind mapping The term mind mapping was devised by Tony Buzan for the representation of such
things as ideas, notes and information, in radial tree diagrams — sometimes also called
spider diagrams. These are now very widely used — try a web search on ‘Buzan’, ‘mind map’
or ‘concept map’. 2.4 Systems thinking ‘The whole is more than the sum of its parts’ is a good place to start thinking about systems. A car is more than its individual components. We can think of a football team as being more than a collection of individual players or a family being more than a group of people who share the same name. Each of these examples – the car, the football team and the family – can be seen as systems. Individual parts of a system are connected together in some way for a purpose. Example 2.1.2 How a force-field diagram can help The diagram is a useful expositional or presentational device. When you are presenting an analysis or proposal, the diagram will enable you to describe (and distinguish between) the reasons for a change. It will enable you to do the same for the reasons why a change may be resisted. The diagram will be an explicit prompt for exploring the restraining forces. The more a manager finds out about these, and the earlier, the better placed the manag 1.6.2 Using the matrix The results of the evaluation reflect the scores that are awarded to each option and the weightings that are attached to the different criteria. A change in one or the other (or in both) will lead to a change in the results. Accordingly, when you construct a matrix of this kind be sure to think hard about the scores and weightings. A matrix like this can be used in many ways, for example, when interviewing applicants as part of a selection process. 1.2.1 Selecting the scales The scales that are used determine the look of the graph. For example, if the horizontal distance between ‘Year 1’ and ‘Year 6’ shown in Figure 2 were doubled, the line would be stretched to double its present length. If the horizontal distance were halved, 2.4 Reasons against social marketing Arguments against the use of social marketing can be based on the following:
Cost – Social marketing programmes can cost considerable amounts of money. Criticisms of these expenditures are heightened as they are often financed by public money in times of resource constraints and therefore have a high opportunity cost. A related issue is that of the problems involved in assessing the success of these programmes. The long term nature of behavi References 5 Conclusion In a financial context, risk is a synonym for uncertainty – the possibility that the actual outcome will differ from the mean expected outcome. It is therefore a neutral rather than a negative concept. Investors are risk-averse in the sense that they require more return for taking on more risk. Risk itself is measured by the standard deviation of actual returns around the mean expectation. In the real world, investment risk is created by a number of different factors that affect the certain 2.2 Calculating returns Our first question was: what is the mean expected total return for next year? We calculate this by taking each of the possible returns and weighting it by its relative probability. As our table is so simple and symmetrical, it is not difficult to see that the weighted mean return is 7% per annum. Our second question was: what is the degree of risk or uncertainty in this mean figure? In other words, how widely dispersed are the possible outcomes around the mean expected outcome? The most 7.6 Who should estimate? The person managing the project is not necessarily the best one to prepare the estimates, although they should be closely involved, both as a source of information and because they need a clear understanding of what the estimates mean and what the estimators assume about outputs, inputs and the transformation process. If there are others who have more experience or more knowledge about some of the areas of work, these people may be the best ones to make estimates for the project or parts of i 6.1 Introduction Scheduling is about deciding the time that each task will take to do and the sequence in which the tasks will be carried out. There are a number of approaches to estimating the time and effort (and, therefore, cost) required to complete a project. Some estimates may be based on past experience but, because each project is essentially unique, this alone may not be sufficient. A clearer picture can be obtained by measuring each task in terms of the content of the work, the effort required to ca 5.1 Introduction One of the most difficult aspects of planning a project is estimating how long it will take to complete each key stage. An estimate might be based on: the size of the tasks and the effort required to complete them; the number of days that are not available for working on the project; historical data from other projects, including the experience of colleagues. Where a project has a fixed end-date (for Learning outcomes At the end of this unit you should be able to: develop plans with relevant people to achieve the project's goals; break work down into tasks and determine handover procedures; identify links and dependencies, and schedule to achieve deliverables; estimate and cost the human and physical resources required, and make plans to obtain the necessary resources; allocate roles with clear lines of responsibility and accountabil 6.2 Alerts Online bookshops and some of the major search engines offer ‘Alerts’ services. These work by allowing you to set up a profile once you have registered on their site, and when there are items meeting your criteria you receive an email. The good thing about alerts is that you don’t have to do anything once you have set up your profile. The downside, particularly with alerts services from the search engines, is that given the extent to which internet traffic is on the increase whether new
