Instance of Project Termination

Describe one instance of project termination you have experienced? What steps were undertaken to close-out the project.

By and large, projects are terminated due to two fundamental reasons: project success or project failure. Project success signifies that the project has encountered its cost, agenda, and technical operation goals and has been incorporated into the organization of customers to play a role to their mission.
Project failure indicates that the project has failed to fulfill its cost, agenda, and technical operation goals, or it is incompetent or unfit in the organization's prospect.

Besides, following are the two broad categories of project termination:

• Natural termination
• Unnatural termination
• Young (2003) draws the attention to some of the causes of project termination:
• The project domino effect have been delivered to the customer
• The project has spilled over its cost and agenda goals
• The project owner's tactic has altered
• The project's backer has been gone
• Ecological changes that have an effect on the project
• The project's main concern is not high enough to go on in the competition

Here's an example of project termination that I have experienced:
I had worked in an automobile company named as HTA. The company terminated the development project for a novel lavish automobile. Code named MB, the automobile would have been the flagship.

After a great deal of thinking, they analyzed that the competition on the marketplace would be much elevated than estimated rendering the project unbeneficial in accordance with their project planning.
In general, the termination judgment does not crop up at any particular point but rather develops gradually all through the project’s lifecycle.

It should be kept in mind that project termination does not refer to a failure, but a tactical verdict put into operation when a project does not or possibly will not back the organizational tactics.
Mostly, due to insufficient resources, time as well as finances, the project closeout phase is ignored. Furthermore, the higher management usually assumes the cost of project closeout needless (Newell, 2004).

Following are the steps in order to close-out the project:

1. Completion - At the outset, the project manager must make certain the project is 100% finalize. It has been observed that in the closeout phase it is quite widespread to find several outstanding small tasks from initial significant stages still uncompleted.
2. Documentation - Documentation can be characterized as any text or illustrative information that elucidates project deliverables (Mooz et al., 2003). It is very important that everything understand during the project, from outset via preliminary operations, should be encapsulated and turn out to be an asset.
3. Project Systems Closure - All project systems should close down at the closeout stage and it involves the monetary system.
4. Project Reviews - The project review usually takes place after the entire project systems are closed. It is a link that joins two projects that appear one after another.
5. Disband the Project Team - Prior to moving the employees amongst other resources, closeout phase offers an outstanding prospect to evaluate the effort, the loyalty and the domino effect of each team member separately.
6. Stakeholder Contentment - It elucidates that actions as well as activities are indispensable to validate that the project has encountered the entire supporter, customer and other stakeholders’ necessities.

References
Mooz, H. Forsberg, K. & Cotterman, H. (2003) Communicating Project Management: The Integrated Vocabulary of Project Management and Systems Engineering. John Wiley and Sons.
Newell, S. (2004) Enhancing Cross-Project Learning, Engineering Management Journal, 16(1), pp 12-20.
Young. (2003) The Handbook of Project Management: A Practical Guide to Effective Policies and Procedures. 2nd Edition, Kogan Page.


Elad Shalom,
CTO at ITweetLive.com

Project Plan Enhancements

What enhancements would you make to the outline we're using for the project plan in this class? What would you recommend? Justify your additions.

Project plan is a standard official document that is utilized to direct both project implementation as well as project control. The chief uses of the project plan are to document planning suppositions and decisions, smooth the progress of communication between stakeholders, and document agreed scope, cost, and calendar baselines. In addition to this, a project plan might be abridged or comprehensive.

To keep the plan up to date is an imperative job of the project manager (Lewis, 2000). Project updates concentrate on the following three constrictions of project management:

• Cost
• Time
• Scope

An efficient project manager fully understands that an amendment in one of the above domains consequences in changes in the rest two. An up to date project plan will exhibit the upshot of these changes on the entire project (Lewis, 2000).

Costs

Particularly in projects having long duration, costs can ebb and flow. Costs of material can alter, internal employees can be fostered with a subsequent enhancement in their hourly rate, and modifications in external outworkers can consequence in elevated agreement rates. These cost changes should be included on the project plan once they are identified and considerable variances communicated to the decision-making team and/or backers (Wysocki, 2006).

Time

As soon as a project plan is approved, a baseline is set up and the project has momentum, the project manager will trace time worked on a daily basis. How frequently this comes about relies on how recent the team requires the plan to be. Updates of weekly basis are nothing out of the ordinary, however, daily might be preferred for projects which are extremely time-sensitive.

It may be a bit hard to remind the team to record their time worked and on what. At times, a project manager is employed to hunt down time and/or jog the memory of team members to report or record their time. Besides, this is a fine time for the project manager to bring the resources part of the project schedule up to date. Vacations as well as team accessibility should be evaluated and reorganized as required.
In addition to this, anticipated arrival of supplies and accessibility of outside resources have an effect on the project (Wysocki, 2006).

Scope

Undoubtedly, any amendment in the project’s scope should be made in the plan when identified and as soon as probable. A number of what-if circumstances are expected to be done before the approval of any scope changes; it relies on the tools employed via the project manager in order to keep up the plan. It is the finest approach to find out the influence of scope changes on the project calendar as well as costs prior to actually allowing the changes (Wysocki, 2006).

It is beneficial to make a set-point in the project plan. At the outset, keep posted the time worked and any recent cost amendments in the plan. Keep this plan as the up to date set point. Afterward, include the scope changes and alter any other factors involved and put aside this as a latest project plan with the exact amendment date.

References
Lewis, J. P. (2000) Project Planning, Scheduling & Control. 3rd edn. McGraw-Hill.
Wysocki, R. K. (2006) Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme. 4th edn. Wiley.


Elad Shalom,
CTO at ITweetLive.com

Perception of Project Management

Consider how your perception of project management has changed during these past eight weeks

Mind, thoughts as well as perception usually changes with the passage of time and the level of knowledge. Everyone possesses a diverse notion about what project management stands for. For some individuals, it is considered on the top of a plain mutual to-do list.
While other considering it as arranging a huge set of resources to generate an extensive deliverable. During the past 8 weeks, my perception about project management has changed and I have come to know that project management is the approach by which business goals are attained. It is regarding being structured from the start of the job to the closing stages.  It is about having an efficient and well-organized team with a leader that can promote collaboration and stimulate to obtain domino effect. 

At present, project managers around the world synchronize the hard work of individual resources to fulfill tasks along with deliverables as constituent of project plans. In olden times, the tools accessible to project managers have been more analogous than dissimilar.

Project management is not simply for project managers any longer. For a lengthy period, project manager was a function, not a designation. Individuals stated that they have come to the site by mishap. In the past few years, this all has been modified. Project manager profession routes have been developed by the organizations. Now, business divisions, for instance, human resources, sales and marketing, and other departments require their staff qualified in project management too (Mooz, Forsberg & Cotterman, 2003).

In our day, a number of diverse techniques are utilized to initialize project management. The team’s manager will put the appropriate individuals in place. Each of them will look after his or her section of the project. If every person performs their job, they will get victory in a quick manner. The manager of the project will want to watch over on how things are proceeding to make certain there are no unexpected concerns that could turn out the project unsuccessful.

The function of project manager is one which permits them to seek some of the finest contemporary tools, programs and modes of working day after day. There are particular levels that every business manager should be familiar with. The foremost one is to concentrate on the organization. It is very important that the team’s leader is competent to systematize properly, giving the appropriate people the appropriate jobs. They will comprehend whose abilities will go with what assignment and that is how they will find out who performs what. They should initially, as a team, scrutinize the problem and make a decision exactly what it requires. They should determine goal and the finest technique to attain it (Wysocki, 2006).

To attain an objective in an effectual manner, the members of the team should add the whole lot they can. They should present esteem to the other team members and collaborate fully (Wysocki, 2006). When an issue or a hindrance comes about that might delay the development of the plan, it should be informed to the entire team member and a verdict should be made to avert further destruction. Via obtaining input from everyone participated, an elucidation can generally be determined that will let the original objective to be fulfilled with a small number of changes or amendments.
Moreover, a first-rate team will come across that their domino effects are precise as well as constructive.
Any amendments to make the data comprehensible should be done along the fashion, however, if there is time to re-evaluate and ascertain, this is always a fine perception.  

References
Mooz, H. Forsberg, K. & Cotterman, H. (2003) Communicating Project Management: The Integrated Vocabulary of Project Management and Systems Engineering. John Wiley and Sons.
Wysocki, R. K. (2006) Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme. 4th edn. Wiley.

Elad Shalom,
CTO at ITweetLive.com

The Chaos Report

The Chaos report lists a variety of success factors that affect project management. This includes user involvement, executive management support, proper planning, clear statement of requirements, realistic expectations, ownership, hard-working and focused staff. Pick one of these, or research an alternative, and assess how this success factor would impact your particular project.

The project managers always search for clandestine formula which will make the projects booming. There are some vital items that need to be considered and ensured in a proactive manner. One searches for those intangible significant success factors that can be handled to make an atmosphere favorable for the accomplishment of the project. According to the Chaos report (2009) the success factors involve User Involvement, Executive Support, Clear Business Objectives, Emotional Maturity, Optimization, Agile Process, Project Management Expertise, Skilled Resources, Execution, Tools and Infrastructure.

User Involvement

User involvement is an important notion in the development of constructive and functional systems and has clear-cut consequences on system success and user contentment. These days, user involvement in design procedures is often missing because of the increasing number of parties and experts that take part and also due to the restricted time to hand over the design. If user involvement lacks then it will easily bring about function and performance issues.

User involvement is an extensive and imperative aspect for planners and architectural model to develop an appropriate product that will work for the users. However, the practice illustrates that users are generally consulted comprehensively at the beginning and occasionally during the entire project. Firm procedures give the tuning of design and implementation procedure required for the adjustment.

According to Barki & Hartwick (1994), user involvement is expressed as a particular psychosomatic status of the user. It signifies the degree to which a user sees IT in terms of its importance as well as personal significance.
User participation is anticipated to be a predecessor to user involvement, for the reason that active participants in IT development have a tendency to develop view that IT is both imperative and pertinent (Barki & Hartwick, 1994).
The more users get involved, the more they will be receptive to a new system although there might be dependent factors hindering the association. Besides, chief management’s leadership may be completely linked with user involvement in the systems development via giving accurate and rational information to users (Barki & Hartwick, 1994).

According to Yoon et al. (1995), user contentment is assumed to be definitely associated with user involvement. Also, systems utilization is anticipated to be absolutely linked with user involvement. Quality of the systems is expected to be improved when more users are involved in the systems development (Barki & Hartwick, 1989).
In addition, users are more expected to come to take hold of an enhanced sense of the systems. This possibly will facilitate users reducing their anxiety, uncertainty, unwillingness to the systems which causes users more accessible to the systems. This encourages a constructive illustration of the systems, which promote users to take on the systems (Leonard-Barton & Sinha, 1993).

References:
Barki, H., & Hartwick, J 1994. ‘Measuring user participation, user involvement, and user attitude’, MIS Quarterly, vol. 18, pp. 59-82.
Leonard-Barton, D., & Sinha, D. K 1993. ‘Developer-user interaction and user satisfaction in internal technology transfer’, Academy of Management Journal, vol. 36, pp. 1125-1139.
Yoon, Y., Guimaraes, T., & O’Neal, Q 1995. ‘Exploring the factors associated with expert systems success’, MIS Quarterly, vol. 19, pp. 83-106.


Elad Shalom,
CTO at ITweetLive.com