Hi I am taking a project management class and I am supposed to ask a project manager the following questions. If anyone has the time to answer these for me it would be greatly appreciated.
What techniques do you employ when managing changes to an ongoing project's scope?
What mode of communication do you use to communicate changes to key stakeholders and project sponsors?
How do you assign resources in order to establish how long a particular project will take and how this information becomes valuable in establishing labor and non-labor costs?
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Josh NankivelEngineering Project Manager| AppleSioux Falls, Sd, United States
Don't be so anonymous! :-)
Some short and sweet answers for you:
What techniques do you employ when managing changes to an ongoing project's scope? - a change control board (CCB) where change requests are submitted, an impact analysis is done, and the board decides to move forward or not.
What mode of communication do you use to communicate changes to key stakeholders and project sponsors? - face to face, always.
How do you assign resources in order to establish how long a particular project will take and how this information becomes valuable in establishing labor and non-labor costs? - there are a few questions in here. Many applications can be used, including an excel spreadsheet to balance allocations for people to the work. I prefer simple methods over more complex ones. Your labor costs are one more piece of the picture, it's just rate times hours charged....with contracts there will be an overhead rate and sometimes you'd use labor categories instead of actual salaries of individuals.
I use a combination of waterfall-style resource-loaded gantt schedules (long term) with my teams' backlog in our Agile Kanban way of working to manage resources (short term).
1) All proposed changes require a Change Request form which details the nature of the request, impact, risk, etc. That Change Request is then brought up at a weekly Change Control Board meeting where it is either accepted / denied / defered. If the change is accepted, it is then injected into the associated documentation that is also under change control, e.g. Project Plan, Requirements, Test Plan, etc.
2) Depending on the nature / impact of the change and the audience, the change may be communicated via the CCB minutes, an ad-hoc meeting, or several phone calls.
3) If your question is "How do you determine how long a project will take?" you simply ask the people who will be doing the work how long it will take. You can ask for optimistic, normal, and pessimistic estimates and then model accordingly. Saving Changes...
Martin AzzopardiSenior Project Manager| SalesforceNorth Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Hi - in anwser to your questions (and you may find a common theme here)
What techniques do you employ when managing changes to an ongoing project's scope?
All changes to scope should be though a formal change control process. The change is identified, documented and costed. It is then evaluated and if things go well, it is approved. You then need to schedule that change into your plan and ensure you have the resources to conduct the work.
What mode of communication do you use to communicate changes to key stakeholders and project sponsors?
Depends on how big the change is. As we have gone though a formal change request anyway, soemtimes the stakeholders are already aware of the change. If it is a technical change that does not affect functionality, it may not be requried to be communicated.
Changes can be communciated either by status reports, a meeting to explain the change or if it is less formal, at least an email notificaiton of the change so people are aware.
How do you assign resources in order to establish how long a particular project will take and how this information becomes valuable in establishing labor and non-labor costs?
I subsribe to knowing my limitations and ask questions - only by asking questions to understand what the project is about can you have any idea of what resources you need and for how long.
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