Earned value management Essay

What is meant by an integrative project management process and why is this so important? What are the pitfalls if such an approach is not taken? The main goal of the integrative project management process is to take a project and design it around the specific needs of a company. This process can sometimes force companies to change how they conduct business, who they advertise too and how they attract new customers. What makes the integrative project management so important to companies is success. When a company spends millions of dollars to implement a new strategy, they want to ensure things go smoothly, especially if they are changing the direction of their business. These projects can take a bit longer to complete because the project manager will have to take the time to get to know the company, and how the conduct business, but in the end a business is usually more successful if they use an integrative project management strategy. When companies don’t follow this stringy, and go with a generic project template it usually ends up wasting time, money and resources. The final project, even though it is complete won’t meet their needs and usually more money is spent on small adjustments to finalize the project. I see this at work all the time, now one ever looks at our computer system as a whole, and designs a plan around what we already have in place. This can become frustrating because we end up with three and four different networks, and none of them ever seem to work correctly. Why is the traditional project management approach less effective when project scope is not clearly understood? Provide examples to illustrate your points. Our text refers to the triple constraint of scope, schedule, and budget. It’s a triple constraint in the sense that variability on any one of the constraints affects the other two. Effective project management must maintain scope, schedule and budget in a relative equilibrium or balance. That is, scope change, either to expand or contract it, will by necessity affect schedule and budget. For example, if an organization wants to make more narrow the scope of a project that is underway, it should require fewer resources and/or less time to accomplish. On the other hand, if the organization wants to expand the scope, it will have a direct effect on resources and schedule in that it will require more resources to finish on schedule, or the schedule will have to slip to accommodate finite resources spread across more project tasks. If project scope is poorly or improperly defined at project initiation, the schedule and budget will also be less valid because of the triple constraint nature of scope, schedule, and budget. Later in the project management timeline when additional requirements may expand the scope, schedule and budget will be impacted. For example, when a former employer was planning a new downtown office building as a company headquarters, they expanded the scope of the project to include a retail shopping and restaurant area. This necessitated arrangements with the city government to expand an adjacent public parking structure and allow a below-street-level tunnel between the building and the parking structure. This scope change resulted in a six-month schedule slip and required additional resources. Wk1 summary (Monday) Typical first week; rather steep curve as the learning teams form, I get into a â€Å"battle rhythm† so I can meet my individual and team requirements, and I figure out what software/tools I need to get the work done. This is only my second online course, and I am reminded that one of the advantages of being a ground student in a particular cohort is that the learning teams stay more or less intact from one course to the next, and we can really hit the ground running. Online is a different dynamic. Reading load is okay so far; I have some familiarity with the material since I have been working in a project environment for some time now.