Project Management: A Comprehensive Guide To Time, Cost, And Quality Constraints

Key Components of a Project Lifecycle

Project management is a critical process of managing a project smoothly through various constraints that the project is bound by. A project manager needs to consider a range of factors while developing the plan for project management (Sepasgozar et al. 2019). This includes the initiation activities like project ideation and stakeholder requirement analysis, planning activities like time-cost analysis, risk planning, execution activities and project closure activities. However, the key constraints that a project manager needs to keep in check are time, cost and quality (Huda, Soepriyono and Azizah 2019) (Josiah 2019). These constraints together are called triple constraints.

In the current assignment, a focus is kept on these constraints. The first task (question 1) targets time and cost constraint analysis and management for the Knowledge Management System development project for Company X. MS Project is a very efficient project management software package that helps manage the scope and constraints of a project. In question 1, it is hence used as a tool for the WBS, time planning and resource and cost management. On the other hand, question 2 focuses on the importance of the triple constraints and their management for a successful project.

There are five key components of a project lifecycle as per the PMBOK guidelines. These are project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring (& controlling) and closure (Rosenberger and Tick 2018). Monitoring is a continuous process that is conducted throughout the project execution phase.

The below work breakdown structure (WBS) created for the current project includes all these key components and the detailed activities involved in these parts of the project:

Table 1: Project work-breakdown

Figure 1: Project Gantt Chart

(Source: Created by Author)

The key resources considered (with their pay rates) are as follows:

Table 2: Resource Sheet

(Source: Created by Author)

The resource allocation as per requirement in the tasks is as follows:

Table 3: Resource Allocation

(Source: Created by Author)

Figure 2: Resource Chart

(Source: Created by Author) 

Figure 4: Resource Usage

(Source: Created by Author)

Therefore, the overall management planning shows that the project can be completed within four months with a net labour cost of $123,320.00. Considering other key expenses like equipment & hardware, server hosting and reserve funds (20%), the overall cost comes to be $153,120.00.

Table 4: Net Budget plan

(Source: Created by Author)

With the detailed activities involved in the scope management planning in the previous task for the KMS development project and the understandings developed by Cen and Busch (2019), some key learning regarding triple constraints is grained. These are:

1. In order to manage an effective outcome of a project following the scopes of a project, all three constraints are important. Therefore, scopes for background research, stakeholder requirement analysis, monitoring plan and a parallel monitoring plan are considered in the plan created (Sirshar, Ali. and Baig 2019) (Aliheidarloo 2020). Furthermore, time scope management for achieving the requirements within a required period (4 months) was crucial for which the time plan for each activity and the task dependencies were critically managed. Whereas, in the article by Cen and Busch (2019), the overall summary of the findings shows that professionals and experts are mostly stressing all the constraints rather than a particular one. Project success was correlated with proper management of these constraints, particularly as per the expert opinions.
2. However, when critical pressures are, their cost can be compromised to maintain the quality and time scope as per the findings by Cen and Busch (2019). Therefore, the plan developed quality and time were kept as the priority to evaluate the costs. Still, an optimizedcost and budget need to be maintained (Sirshar, Ali and Baig 2019).

References

Cen, M. and Busch, P., 2019. Project management success factors in an Australian SME. In International Business Information Management Association Conference (34th: 2019) (pp. 916-929). International Business Information Management Association (IBIMA).

Sepasgozar, S.M., Karimi, R., Shirowzhan, S., Mojtahedi, M., Ebrahimzadeh, S. and McCarthy, D., 2019. Delay causes and emerging digital tools: A novel model of delay analysis, including integrated project delivery and PMBOK. Buildings, 9(9), p.191.

Josiah, C., 2019. Factors Affecting Triple Constraints in Project Management Success (Doctoral dissertation, The Open University of Tanzania).

Sirshar, M., Ali, S.H. and Baig, H.S., 2019. Project Management’s Triple Constraints Mapping on Augmented Reality based Learning System for Improved Quality.

Hassan, A.K., Adeleke, A.Q. and Taofeeq, D.M., 2019. The effects of project triple constraint on Malaysia Building Projects. Social Science and Humanities Journal, 3(5), pp.1222-1238.

Aliheidarloo, A., 2020. Increasing Construction Project Management Quality by Applying Data-Driven Construction Tools to Manage the Triple Constraints.

Rosenberger, P. and Tick, J., 2018, November. Suitability of PMBOK 6 th edition for agile-developed IT Projects. In 2018 IEEE 18th International Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Informatics (CINTI) (pp. 000241-000246). IEEE.

Huda, M., Soepriyono, S. and Azizah, S., 2019, November. Implementation of PMBoK 5th standard to improve the performance and competitiveness of contractor companies. In ICASI 2019: Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference On Advance And Scientific Innovation, ICASI 2019, 18 July, Banda Aceh, Indonesia (p. 242). European Alliance for Innovation.

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