Creating a Project Schedule and Budget

What are useful actions to take when assessing your project's performance?

-Act quickly to correct any variance and realign the specific activity or deliverable with the plan -Pinpoint any areas where there are divergences between the actual performance data and the plan -Gather work performance data, including actual task completion durations and costs -Analyze the actual performance data by comparing it to the project plan

What actions are involved in creating a project budget?

-Describe possible risks to completing project deliverables -Calculate project cost estimates -Determine how much money you'll need in contingency reserves

1.Analogous estimating 2.Bottom-up estimating 3.Parametric estimating

1.A website developer works out how much it will cost to create a new website by looking at the budget of a similar website that her company developed last year. 2.To assess the cost of implementing a new IT infrastructure, an IT manager itemizes each specific task and deliverable required and adds up the cost and duration of each one. 3.A marketing manager wants to get 150 brochures designed and printed for an upcoming trade show. She calculates that each brochure will cost approximately $2.50 to produce and uses this as the basis of her total costs.

1.A correlation between two deliverables that shows which deliverable must be completed before the other one can start. 2.A deliverable that requires the deliverable that directly precedes it to have finished before work can begin on it. 3.A deliverable that doesn't have a dependency on another deliverable so that the two can be carried out simultaneously. 4.A deliverable that must finish so that all subsequent deliverables in its path can start.

1.Dependency 2.Successor 3.Concurrent (parallel) activity 4.Predecessor

Put the steps in the project schedule creation process in order.

1.Order the tasks according to their predecessors and successors 2.Place the sequence of tasks in a network diagram 3.Give each task a specific duration in hours, days, or weeks 4.Combine the task durations in each path to get the critical path 5.Assign start and finish dates for each task

1.Mandatory milestone 2.Optional milestone

1.Sandra notes in her project schedule the completion date for edits before her company's magazine is due to be sent to the printers -Andrew marks in his schedule the last day on which his client's end-of-year financial reports can be submitted 2.Kate would like to review her company's marketing strategy at the end of the month, but may defer the task until the following week if necessary -Zack sets a date for the installation of electrical wiring in a new office block, knowing that if they hit the date his team will be well ahead of schedule and can celebrate their success