A project is an undertaking that has a beginning and an end and is carried out to meet the established goals within the cost, schedule and quality objectives. Generally a project has the following characteristics:
1. It has a start, and end, and a duration.
2. To performance the project successfully, specific resources are needed.
3. It is usually a on
4. Often cuts across organizational and functional lines. The people for the project are drawn from different departments, sometimes, outside experts are also needed for consultation.
5. A project has clearly defined objectives, which may subject to subsequent change or alteration depending on changing circumstance.
Just in the stage of the start of a project, a project initial document plays a pivotal role, which acts a milestone against which the progress could be assessed and measured to identify possible problem emerged and ensure the task is on track.
A project initial document should address the following questions:
What should the project achieve? What are its deliverables? These should be formulated in detail so that the project and its scope are well defined from its outset.
How will the quality or outputs be assessed? Some measurable standards should be set reasonably both considering the financial and the non-financial aspect.
Who will lead the project? And how the project team is constructed?
What are the risks related to the project? How have they been assessed and prioritized? What are the anticipated methods to manage the risk
Other aspects that should be considered are the finish time, the constraints on the project, the budget arrangement and so forth.
More imp
The first is the definition of the project. A well-defined project will detail the various aspects set above mentioned in the project initial document. For example, just stating that the new IT system will improve the inventory management is meaningless. There should be of the consideration such things that whether the firm will move to using jus-in-time? Or the firm will develop sophisticated algorithms to forecast the demand? The warehouse should be aimed to be automated? How the labour and the machine should be used after the improved efficiency?
The second consideration is the size of the project. It is salient the bigger the project, the more risks associated with it, and also more stakeholders involved, and consequently more possible dispute and conflict needed to resolve. By contrast, small project will be easier to control and if they do go wrong, damage is likely to be confined to a smaller number of stakeholders.
The third aspect is the sophistication of the project. Clearly, a project which will be attempting to use the cutting edge and experimental technology may be more likely to fail than that just using well understood solutions.
So if you are put in charge of a large, poorly defined, sophisticated project, you might like to look round for another job, since if the project fails to deliver( and highly likely), you could be the number on
Of course, there are several methods available to mange the risk to come in the future. After taking risk analysis and prioritizing the risk implication, risks can be managed in the following ways:
1. Tolerate the risk. Giving the consequence will be immaterial or the probability of the risk materialization is very low. It means no matter how the outcome is, the firm will accept the risk.
2. Risk reduction. Some risk might be inherent to unavoidable, so the measures should be taken to reduce the consequence of the risk occurring. For example, if the consequences of missing the deadline are severe, then, adding available resources to the project could speed up the process if necessary.
3. Risk transfer. Insurance is the most used method. The risk could be transfer a third party in return for a given premium.
4. Risk avoidance. No doubt, some project will contain high risk and the impact of failure on the business might be disastrous even if the high return would be envisaged. Given the high risk involving, terminating a project may be advisable.
To make a project successful, it is not an easy course or task, particularly for the big project which need strategic management and dynamic thinking and the flairs or the talents as well.
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