Project Management: A Managerial Approach, 8th Edition

PART II

PROJECT PLANNING

In Part II we discuss project planning in terms of planning the activities, budget, and schedule for the project, as shown in the accompanying figure. Chapter 6 deals with project activity and risk planning and presents tools useful in organizing and staffing the various project tasks. It also contains a short discussion of phase-gate management systems and other ways of dealing with the problems that arise with complex projects. Budgeting, the planning and control of costs, is addressed next in Chapter 7. We also include a section on the treatment of risks in budgeting through simulation.

Scheduling, a crucial aspect of project planning, is then described in Chapter 8, along with the most common scheduling models such as the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and precedence diagramming. Concluding Part II, the effect of resource allocation on the project schedule is covered in Chapter 9. For single projects, we discuss how the resource allocation problem concerns resource leveling to minimize the cost of the resources while still remaining on schedule. But for multiple projects, we learn that the issue is how to allocate limited resources among several projects in order to achieve the objectives of each. This chapter also describes project crashing (by the Critical Path Method) and scheduling insights from the concept of the Critical Chain.