Project management techniques You have been appointed by senior management as project manager for a key project within your organization.

Project management techniques

You have been appointed by senior management as project manager for a key project within your organization. Your project board has asked for a project plan that will be used as a baseline against which to monitor project progress and to cost stage by stage. The board has also asked that you fully justify your approach at each stage based on current best practice as indicated in the academic literature.

In order to address the assignment requirements, you may choose a project from your organisation or, where you do not have a current project, either use a project you have worked on previously. It is important that the project you choose is suitable for dealing with the set tasks: neither too simple nor too large and complex. 

For your chosen project you must provide:          

1) A project overview giving a brief background to the project, the project scope, objectives and deliverables, together with relevant exclusions and constraints. It is important that these requirements are well-defined and SMART characteristics identified wherever possible. You need to critically reflect on the importance of each of these concepts in project planning.                                                                                                                

2) A critical evaluation of different potential project structures that you could employ. Identify and justify the project structure that you have chosen to adopt for this project; explain why this structure provides the best approach for project success and evaluate its relationship to your overall organisational structure.                                                                                                             

3) A Work Breakdown Structure broken down by sub-activity to the level of work packages. It is important that key deliverables are identified for each stage and the rationale for determining the work packages explained. You will also need to explain why a WBS is important in planning, how it fits within the planning process and the skills required by the Project Manager to optimise the effectiveness of the WBS.                                                                                                     

 4) For one work package chosen from (3) provide an estimate of resources using appropriate techniques and a budget detailing the costs associated with delivering the work package, illustrating cash flow over the period of the work package. You will need to evaluate alternative estimating techniques and justify your choice of technique for this project.                                                                                                 

 5) Explain why managing risk is important within a project and critically evaluate appropriate techniques for managing that risk. For one work package chosen from (3) provide a risk register using risk identification techniques, risk assessment techniques and risk filtering techniques. You will need to fully justify the techniques you have chosen to use.