Project management is one of the most important phases in a project, as it stipulates the process, time, resources and most importantly cost for the project. During the first week of studies, I have come across one of the most prominent products for Project management in IT industry - Microsoft Project. This proprietary product has inbuilt tools for project management like - Gantt chart, Work breakdown structure etc; which is the best fit for a traditional project management approach. In addition to this MS project also provisions the Agile methodology for Project Management, through a separate plugin called sprint.
Gantt chart is a widely used tool for time management in a project, along with WBS for resource management. AS project integrates both these together to give the customer an integrated solution for time and resource management.
One disadvantage observed using Gantt chart is that, if we have simultaneous tasks which is not that effective.
Another process in the project management phase is WBS (Work Break down structure). This is the phase which initiates the project; where the actual work is segregated to estimates and sub-estimates. This would help the organization to assess the resource strength, and if there is a need to approach vendors for any tasks. A sample WBS would look like below
In our project management approach, we have used MS project to create the Gantt chart. But a drawback observed with the tool was that, it don'e have a provision to draft a WBS, nor does it have an option to relate the WBS variables to the actual tasks in the Gantt chart.
Another important process is the Stake holder analysis. This is a graphical tool which plots the positions of the stake holders in the project based on the parameters chosen. Stake holder analysis is a generic and versatile method which enables the users to choose their own parameters as x-axis and y-axis. The stake holder analysis drafted for our project is as shown below :
My first comment - looking forward to your next posting :)