Got our tests back today from last week. 96%. Missed one question, which on review was just a dumb mistake. I feel pretty good about this class overall.  Project Management today.
Chapter 13:Â Project Management
A Project is a series of related jobs or tasks with a definite starting and ending point which results in a unique product or service.
Project Management is the planning, directing, and controlling of resources to meet the technical, monetary, and time constraints of the project. Project management includes several phases.
- Planning Phase includes setting goals or objectives, defining project, and organizing the teams that will work on the project
- Scheduling Phase assigns resources to specific activities and sets milestones for completion.
- Project Controlling Phase happens while the project is ongoing, and consists of keeping the project on track with the plans and dealing with unforeseen events.
Various quantitative analysis techniques exist to help schedule and manage projects. PERT is the Program Evaluation and Review Technique. CPM is the Critical Path Method. Both methods have six common steps.
- Define the project.
- Determine the activities involved in completing the project.
- Define the relationships between the various project activities to create an activity network.
- Assign times to the various activities. For PERT, these times will be probabilistic estimates.
- Compute the longest (in time taken) path through the activity network.
Both methods attempt to find the critical path through the required project activities. The critical path is the longest time path through the network of events that makes up the project. In order to reduce the total time taken by the project, one must speed up events on the critical path. Shortening events outside the critical path will not change the project completion date. In this sense, the critical path events are constraints; this process is analogous to the theory of constraints.