Improving The Poor Estimating Methods Of Using Dummy Variables

Professor Silver ask his students to select a project and interview various people who are directly or supposed to be directly involved in the project to determine the reason for increase in project expense and the inability to finish timely. Most of the students responded with reports that stated many projects have overruns because the project team is given unrealistic schedules, unreliable vendors, and lack of trained personnel. Professor Silver claims that the reason for overruns is task time estimates. He uses probability distribution graph to explain that uncertainties are important to consider when determining the probability of finishing a project. He states that a project should add safety or otherwise known as slop to increase the length of time for the project’s completion assuring that the project will be completed on time. Adding safety or slop to a project will ensure that there is more than enough time to complete a task and encourages multitasking.

project data from work breakdown structures and schedules" and comparing it to "topdown project goals." After this, the teams are to estimate investment risks

Project A: This project is new to your company. You do not feel confident in estimating the project costs using internal resources. There are other companies that have done this type of work. Yet you still want the most accurate estimates possible.

592 Week 1 DQ 1 WBS Construction PROJ 592 Week 1 DQ 2 Project Cost Estimates and Assumptions PROJ 592 Week 2 DQ 1 Cost Components PROJ 592 Week 2 DQ 2 Estimating Processes PROJ 592 Week 3 DQ 1 Project Schedules PROJ 592 Week 3 DQ 2 Sensitivity Analysis PROJ 592 Week 4 DQ 1 Resource Allocation and Leveling PROJ 592 Week 4 DQ 2 Advanced Schedule Techniques PROJ 592 Week 5 DQ 1 Earned Value Calculation PROJ 592 Week 5 DQ 2 Project Monitoring and Control & EV PROJ 592 Week 6 DQ 1 Forecasting Project Completion Cost PROJ 592 Week 6 DQ 2 Project Control PROJ 592

Describe common practices to estimate the duration of project activities as well as real reasons that cause project delays.

The following data consists of the actual time used and potential (the best time possible for this review process) to complete each step in the review process. The actual times are based on the review of 30 projects. The potential times are subjective engineering judgment estimates.

The project path of task A(3weeks) plus task C(4.5weeks) plus task E(5weeks) plus task H(11weeks) plus task J(3.5weeks) which equals 27 weeks total.

In almost every business, project management is critically important. The critical path method (CPM) will provide a timeline for the project manager for when tasks should be completed. In addition, providing a deadline and the negative effects it will have on the following successors if not completed on time. These many task are interdepended. Therefore, the CPM provides the start and finishes times of the tasks, and identifies the few tasks on the critical path that the project manager should observe to determine which task needs the most attention. Already discovering and incorporating the details the task or assignments may require, CPM calculates all task times, which can be measured in hours, days, weeks, and months. For any unintended manually input errors, a warning message will be provided. Including an automatic successor generator, task numbering comment, and data validation, makes it easier on the project manager.

We used PV (planned Value), AC (actual cost), and EV (earned value) to calculate SPI (schedule performance index), SV (schedule variance), CPI (cost performance index), and CV (cost variance). Among these indicators, SPI and SV show whether a project is behind schedule or not, and CPI and CV indicate whether a project is under budget. Therefore, the statuses of the schedule and cost of technical infrastructure, software customization, and combined projects can be easily and clearly checked, respectively.

The cost planning is one of important phases for project management. It will goes through whole project’s life cycle. It is foundation of project and it will tell the project are measured, reported and controlled in every process. Estimating is the process of forecasting or approximating the time and cost of completing project deliverables.

In field of project management, there are a plethora of mechanisms under perpetual reevaluation. One specific segmentation of project management under such scrutiny pertains to cost duration, which is the time and monetary costs of completing individual tasks within the project’s critical path (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). The process of monitoring and evaluating the time and financial impacts of each task is referred to as cost duration analysis (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). A chief concern of cost duration analysis is identifying tasks within the project’s critical path which can reduce project duration (PMI, 2013). A common approach to reducing a project’s duration is task “crashing” (PMI, p.181). According to The Project Management Institute (2013) crashing refers to the process of methodical determining the financial value of increasing a critical path task’s resources in order to decrease project duration (p.181).

Engineers are also required to use honesty and not over exaggerate claims or estimates when the data is available to make an informed decision. When making statements regarding an estimate members are required to accurately measure the cost and time in which it will take to produce a design. Misleading development times and costs not only results in damages of a financial sense but also in a loss of quality of the product or design. To prevent such

The PERT method requires three estimates of time; optimistic, most likely and pessimistic. This method assumes that actual project times are distributed according to the beta probability distribution. Most time estimates often exceed the best estimate or the most likely estimate because managers like to be optimistic with their time estimates.

A key activity in project management is assessing project constraints. A project has three limitations: scope, budget and schedule. These limitations are project constraints because they are sensitive to change and have an impact on project risk. Risk is exposure to uncertain outcomes. Project constraints are mutually exclusive. If one constraint changes it affects the others and adjustments may be required to compensate and manage risks. For example, a delay in the schedule can increase the risk that the project will not finish on time. Time is money and delays have a negative impact on the budget. To

* Many IT professionals think that preparing cost estimates is a job for accountants when in fact, it is a very demanding and important skill that project managers need