Final Project

I am very grateful to Manhattan College for including Project Management coursework within the MSOL degree.  I now have much more experience in using Microsoft Project and the concepts behind effective project management.  I hope to have more opportunities to put this critical tool into action at my workplace.  My final project encompassed everything we did during this course and I am happy to publish it here.  I look forward to implementing the project over the next 8 months.

Full Circle

I feel I have come full circle in six short weeks.  Having had some prior coursework in project management helped prepare me for this week's assignments.  I was thrilled to finally put most of my previous and newly learned knowledge in action.

This week I prioritized work to be done for the St. Dismas project and outlined these priorities in the WBC, the Gantt chart and the precedence diagrams I created.  I also outlined a budget for each task and what significant items I would outlined for the senior leadership at St. Dismas to prepare them for the unexpected.  It was nice to go back to Excel basics and plug in formulas for the percentages for the optimistic and pessimistic budget options.

I look forward to finishing my final project and hope I can explain, in detail, every step of the way.  One of the weaknesses is my ability to explain in spoken word and in a presentation exactly what I am trying to say.  I am much better at writing papers and outlining things in print.

Wish me luck.

Diane

Here are the Excel sheets I created:

without formulas:

with formulas:

Precedence Diagrams

I really enjoyed this week's topic of precedence diagramming.  I learned how to do a forward pass and a backward pass to determine the slack/float of a project and how to determine the critical path of a project in an optimistic, most likely, or least likely time frame.  I used Microsoft Project to assist me with the WBS, AON and Gantt charts.  However, I did the precedence diagrams by hand as you can see, below.  I look forward to hearing from the professor to see if I arrived at the critical path and end dates correctly.

Task Name	Duration	Start	Finish	Predecessors
Task 1	2 days	Sun 2/4/18	Mon 2/5/18
Task 2	5 days	Sun 2/4/18	Thu 2/8/18
Task 3	3 days	Fri 2/9/18	Tue 2/13/18	2
Task 4	7 days	Tue 2/6/18	Wed 2/14/18	1
Task 5	11 days	Tue 2/6/18	Tue 2/20/18	1
Task 6	5 days	Thu 2/15/18	Wed 2/21/18	2,4
Task 7	9 days	Wed 2/14/18	Mon 2/26/18	3
Task 8	5 days	Thu 2/22/18	Wed 2/28/18	3,6
Task 9	7 days	Thu 2/15/18	Fri 2/23/18	4
Task 10	3 days	Wed 2/21/18	Fri 2/23/18	5
Task 11	15 days	Tue 2/27/18	Mon 3/19/18	7
Task 12	6 days	Thu 3/1/18	Thu 3/8/18	8
Task 13	7 days	Mon 2/26/18	Tue 3/6/18	9,10
Task 14	12 days	Tue 2/27/18	Wed 3/14/18	7
Task 15	16 days	Fri 3/9/18	Fri 3/30/18	12,13

Budgeting and Scheduling

This week was an incredible week as I learned how to estimate costs by understanding how the accounting department, the comptroller's office and the project manager view and manage the costs of a project.  I also learned how to estimate and schedule a project using the WBS, a precedence list, the critical path method (CPM), and an AON Diagram, which help to determine not only the critical path the project must follow but also those tasks that allow for flexibility (float) without causing delays in the delivery of a project.

Here is an example of a critical path diagram:

An example of an AON Diagram is below: