Question

Who should be involved in developing a WBS? Describe 2 techniques Project Managers can use to estimate the time needed for tasks in the WBS.

Explain how PERT can improve the accuracy of our estimates for project schedules.

Who are project stakeholders? What do we need to know about them? How do we need to communicate with them (what tools/metrics can we use)? (please reply asap)

Answer 1

Ans: - WBS is a work breakdown structure which is used by the top companies and organization to develop their project in efficient manner. To make the project work easy to manage and productive the project is divided into smaller tasks. These smaller tasks become easy to handle and give results faster.

To develop a WBS structure the whole team is involved. It’s is not the task of only one member like project manager or team leader. The whole team is required to complete their work with dedication.

WBS can be developed with the help of the previous project that has the same characteristics and requirements. There are documentations for every project completed in any organization and these documents can help to develop an effective WBS structure. It can tell that how much required to complete the project work, workforce required and resources required to complete the project work.

Then the WBS is created by breaking down the elements of project into smaller parts. Every element is then manged by different team members.

Techniques that project manager can use: -

1) PERT

PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) is very well-known technique that Project managers can use to estimate the time needed to complete the tasks in the WBS technique. This technique uses some statistical methods to estimate the time required to complete the project. The task are decomposed into detailed manner and then the Gannt chart is prepared. Then with the help of both PERT and Gannt chart the time is estimated.

2) Gannt Chart

Gannt chart is also a very useful technique which can be used to estimate the time of the project. It creates the timelines in the form of graphic visuals that represent the starting date and end date of the different tasks.

PERT technique is very effective for measuring the estimation time of any project. PERT calculation can be done in three ways

1) Optimistic time estimation: -

As from its name the time estimated in optimistic way that means the minimum time that is required to complete a work. If all the resources are available and all activities are completed in the decided span of time than this technique becomes effective.

2) Most Likely Estimation: -

In this technique the one activity completed is submitted to the upper management of the organization by the project manager. It means submitting one task estimation which is evaluated by higher management.

3) Pessimistic time estimation: - This can be the worst-case scenario estimation means the maximum time that can be taken to complete the project work. If the activities don’t get completed as planned than there is the case of this estimation.

By using these three estimation techniques all the scenarios of any project can be estimated.

Project stakeholders are the people who invest in the project and try to gain profit after the deployment of the project. The project stakeholders can be a customer, project manager, team member of the project or any external sponsor for the project.

There are several things that we need to know about the project stakeholders. The project stakeholder should be trustworthy towards the organization as project is a long-term work and stakeholder should support organization in the project work. The involvement of the stakeholder in the project matters a lot. The project should analyse and monitor the work that is being done than we can say that he is a good and responsible stakeholder. The engagement of the stakeholder with the project manager and team member is also important. It shows the interest of the stakeholder in the project completion.

There are different methods by which we can communicate with the project stakeholders as follows:-

Schedule the meetings with different stakeholders and choose the most suitable stakeholder.

Scheduling the conference call with the stakeholder asks them about their expectations from the project.