Developing A Schedule For WorkHouse Australia Project

Part A: Developing the Schedule

The project presented in this assignment relates to the Workhouse Australia. The company – “WorkHouse Australia” – intends to open three high profile High street Workshop’s for sharing skills, repairing, up-cycling and re-productising consumer goods and technologies. The three site, all across the eastern sea board, are; Toowong Qld, Hawthorn Vic and Leichardt NSW. The base of the project will be at the Yard space in Leichardt.

Part A: Developing the Schedule

• The schedule was developed and is attached in the file named; mpp

In developing the schedule, the following assumptions were taken into consideration;

• For each flight and accommodation, it is assumed that flights were taken from one location to another, without first returning to the head-office.
• Where the duration of stay was over a week, it was assumed that accommodation included the weekends and any holiday that may appear within the scheduled period.
• Number of Flights included the return flight to the head-office

Part A; Question 2

1. To level out the resource allocation, MS Project was used. An automatic levelling option was used, havingset the rightoptions for levelling, to eliminate the options;

• Adding resources to tasks
• Creating Splits for tasks
• Adjust individual assignments on a task

1. Summary of the changes

The difference in the totals between PartAQ1.mpp and PartAQ2.mpparises from the resource levelling; the total cost does not change since levelling introduces slakes, and no new resources are added. The slake time for personnel are not billed and thus the cost of the project remains the same.

1. As a result of the levelling, the project is likely to encounter a number of problems. MS Project levelled the resource by re-scheduling the tasks; some tasks however require personnel to travel to the site and re-scheduling them will result in cost increases when the flight and accommodation are factored in. 

Part A Question 3 : Memo to Harold Steptoe 

To: Harold Steptoe 

From: The Project Manager,

WorkHouse Australia Project

Subject: Completion of the Planning Phase and Project Updates

The  planning state of the WorkHouse Australia Project has been completed successfully. From the schedule developed, the expected completion date of the project is November 5th 2019. Thus, the total duration of the project will be 267 days. The project will take longer than earlier projections, owing to a number of factors. Like any other project the main trade-offs are time and resources. The extended project period was as a  result of levelling out the available resources, since some tasks have to be carried out by the same people; requiring the tasks to be spread out.  

The project phased two critical choices to make in deciding the levelling approach to use; Increase the budget or Spend more time on the project. Since the current priority was on working within the given budget, the levelling was done by spreading out the tasks.  To shorten the duration of time for the project, I would recommend the addition of more resources to the project, especially the Craft Artisans. This will translate to an increase in the project budget. Currently, the estimated direct cost for each project resource  is a follows;

The resources that need to be increased include;

• Craft Artisan: Craft artisans are involved in many processes that are carried out concurrently, therefore, increasing the number of artisans has a positive effect on the overall schedule. 

The main tasks that were shorted, by allocating more Craft Artisans are ; painting, workbench assembly, power tool assembly, 3d printer setup and test, packing containers, workstation installation, system training, taxonomies development and KMS population. All these tasks involves the use of the craft artisans. From the testing done with “what if” analysis, no further changes can enhance the schedule.  

Part A Question 2

The current project plan does not have any quality control tasks. The WBS only contain tasks that are critical to the completion of the project, but no activity was included to check on quality. Two quality issues can occur on this project;

Software quality: the software to be developed need to be tested for quality issues; particularly, bugs and usability issues. A quality control task would be critical for ensuring that the developed software is of high quality in terms of performance, usability and maintainability (Burke, 2013).

Workshop refurbishment quality: the refurbishment of the workshops requires to be evaluated, to ensure that they meet high quality and are usable.

To ensure such quality issues are taken into consideration, the following activities can be added to the project to enhance quality checks.

Part A Question 6

Two more activities can be included in the project to ensure it is successful. The activities include;

• Requirement evaluation: after gathering requirements for the various software modules, a verification process with the key stakeholders, and intended users of the software, need to be carried out (Turner, 2014).. This will ensure that the gathered requirements are comprehensive.
• Dry Run Tests: after integration testing, and before the system goes live, a dry-run test need to be carried out to ensure the system runs as expected. 

Part B: Revising the Plan

• Part B Question 1 :  Find attached MS Project file:  PartB.mpp

Part B Question 2

Part B Question 3 : Impact of each of these changes on the project cost

Part B Question 4: How to manage and monitor progress of the 4 sprints.

To ensure successful completion of the project, a number of monitoring and management approaches will be used. This being an agile methodology, the monitoring of the sprints will be carried out through;

• Sprint Burndown: In an agile methodology, a sprint burndown metric is used to measure and track a team’s work and completion of tasks throughout the sprint (James, 2009. This metric only focuses on tracking work done by the team. For this project, sprint burndown will be used to track work done at the sprint iteration level.
• Release Burndown: Unlike sprint burndown metric which only focuses on work completion at the sprint level,  this metric looks over the entire project (Schwaber, 2004). For this project, the Release burndown will be used to track the outputs of all the 4 sprints, helping the project manager check on the progress of the overall project section.
• Velocity: the final metric for use in monitoring and managing the sprints is the velocity metric. By definition, Velocity is the volume of work accomplished by a given team, over a specified time period (Cervone, 2011). 

Conclusion

This assignment involved the scheduling of WorkHouse Australia project under different constraints. The main task of the project was to create a schedule using MS Project, level out resources and analyze the effect of various forms of levelling and resource adjustments. From the analysis, it is clear that a given project has to consider the two main trade-offs; time and resources. Increasing resources to a project translates to shortening of the project’s duration. On the other hand, having more time for the project means that the project can – in most case – be down with fewer resources, which may translate to cost savings.

Finally, the project has analyzed the effect of using an agile methodology in the implementation of the project. In this case, the introduction of sprints required addition of more resources, although it did not translate to shortening of the project duration. To monitor progress of an agile project, 3 methods were proposed, namely; sprint burndown, Release burndown and velocity.  

References

Burke, R., 2013. Project management: planning and control techniques. New Jersey, USA.

Cervone, H.F., 2011. Understanding agile project management methods using Scrum. OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, 27(1), pp.18-22.

James, M., 2009. Scrum methodology. Accessed: Apr, 8, p.2015.

Schwaber, K., 2004. Agile project management with Scrum. Microsoft press.

Turner, J.R., 2014. Handbook of project-based management(Vol. 92). New York, NY: McGraw-hill.

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