MODULE 2: PLANNING PROJECTS

Module-02: Contents
Defining the project scope, Project scope checklist, Project priorities,
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), Integrating WBS with
organization, coding the WBS for the information system. Scheduling
Projects: Purpose of a project schedule, historical development, how
project schedules are limited and created, develop project schedules,
uncertainty in project schedules, Gantt chart.

Project scope
The scope of a project defines the boundaries of what will be delivered and what won't be
delivered. It is a statement of the project's objectives, deliverables, and the work required to
achieve those objectives. The scope outlines what is included in the project, and also what is
not included.
Defining the scope of a project is critical to ensure that all stakeholders have a clear
understanding of what the project will deliver. This clarity is essential in managing expectations
and avoiding scope creep, where additional work is added to the project without proper
evaluation of its impact on budget, timeline, and resources. A well-defined scope helps in
developing realistic project plans, identifying potential risks and constraints, and allocating
resources effectively.

Project scope checklist

• Project overview and description of work.
• Project justification.
• Project goals and objectives.
• Deliverables.
• Processes.
• Resources.
• Budget.
• Costs.

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 • Identify all stakeholders involved in the project
• Define and understand project objectives
• Define project deliverables
• Identify project requirements
• Determine project limitations
• Define project milestones
• Define project tasks and sub-tasks
• Develop project schedule
• Estimate project costs
• Define communication strategies and plans
• Create project risk assessment
• Create project quality assurance plan
• Approval: Project Manager on Project Scope
• Prepare project scope statement document
• Approval: Stakeholders on Project Scope Statement
• Finalize and distribute Project Scope Document
• Update Project Management Plan
• Review and adjust project schedule as necessary
• Train team on project scope management.

Project priorities
Project priorities are the assignments that you designate as the most important in your
workflow. Top priority projects are tasks that you need to start immediately and that you
provide with the highest-quality resources, while low priority projects may not even have an
immediate deadline.

There are six stages in the prioritization process

• Assess projects for business value
• Filter projects for urgency
• Map out project dependency
• Estimate the scope, timeline, and costs of each project
• Assess your budget against project costs
• Assess your team’s bandwidth against project scope and timelines.

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Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) a hierarchical decomposition of the total scope of work to
be carried out by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required
deliverables.

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a tree structure, which shows a subdivision of
effort required to achieve an objective; for example, a program, project, and contract. The WBS
may be hardware, product, service, or process oriented. A WBS can be developed by starting
with the end objective and successively subdividing it into manageable components in terms
of size, duration, and responsibility (e.g., systems, subsystems, components, tasks, subtasks,
and work packages), which include all steps necessary to achieve the objective.

Purpose for Creating a WBS for Projects

There are three reasons to use a WBS in your projects.

1. The first is that is helps more accurately and specifically define and organize the scope of
the total project. The most common way this is done is by using a hierarchical tree structure.
Each level of this structure breaks the project deliverables or objectives down to more specific
and measurable chunks.

2. The second reason for using a WBS in your projects is to help with assigning
responsibilities, resource allocation, monitoring the project, and controlling the project. The
WBS makes the deliverables more precise and concrete so that the project team knows exactly
what has to be accomplished within each deliverable. This also allows for better estimating of
cost, risk, and time because you can work from the smaller tasks back up to the level of the
entire project.

3. Finally, it allows you double check all the deliverables’ specifics with the stakeholders and
make sure there is nothing missing or overlapping.

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 Figure: Work Breakdown Structure

Process of Creating a WBS

There are several inputs you will need to get you off on the right foot:
• The Project Scope Statement
• The Project Scope Management Plan
• Organizational Process Assets
• Approved Change Requests
These inputs should give you all the information you and your team needs to create your WBS.
Along with these inputs, you will use certain tools as well. Finally, using these inputs and tools
you will create the following outputs:
• Work Breakdown Structure
• WBS Dictionary
• Scope Baseline
• Project Scope Statement (updates)
• Project Scope Management Plan (updates)
• Requested Changes

Integrating the WBS with the organization

• An integral part of WBS is to define the organizational units responsible for performing
the work. In practice, the outcome of the process is the organization breakdown
structure (OBS). The OBS depicts how the firm has organized to discharge work
responsibility. The purpose of the OBS are to provide a framework to summarize
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 organization unit work performance, identify organization units responsible for work
packages and tie the organizational unit to cost control accounts. Cost accounts group
similar work packages. The OBS defines the organization sub-deliverables in a
hierarchical pattern in successively smaller and smaller units.
• As in the WBS, the OBS assigns the lowest organizational unit the responsibility for
work packages within a cost account. The intersection of work packages and the
organizational unit creates a project control point (cost account) that integrates work
and responsibility. Control can be checked from two directions – outcomes and
responsibility. In the execution phase of the project, progress can be tracked vertically
on deliverables (client’s interest) and tracked horizontally by organizational
responsibility (management’s interest).

Coding the WBS for the Information System

Coding system is very important to gain the maximum benefit of a work breakdown system.
The codes are used to define levels and elements in the WBS, organization elements, work
packages, budget and cost information. The codes allow reports to be consolidated at any level
in the structure. The most commonly used scheme is numeric indention. Some organizations
use alphabet letters and most of the organizations use the combination of both.

Scheduling Projects:
Purpose of a project schedule:
The main purpose of project scheduling is to represent the plan to deliver the project scope
over time. A project schedule, in its simplest form, could be a chart of work elements with
associated schedule dates of when work elements and milestones (usually the completion of a
deliverable) are planned to occur.

The point of project scheduling is to bring together the work to be done and the timeline for
completion into a single resource for the team. It’s a document that summarizes the entirety of
the project and acts as a guide to getting the work done. It’s the roadmap for the team.
Basically, it’s hard to run a project without a schedule.

The importance of scheduling on projects cannot be underestimated. It’s a fundamental skill

for a project manager – so much so that many large projects have people in the role of scheduler
(or planner) where scheduling and maintaining the schedule is the main part of their job.

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5 benefits of project scheduling.
• Prioritization
• Tracking
• Resource management
• Risk management
• Stakeholder satisfaction
Projects are undertaken to accomplish important business purposes, and people often want to
be able to use the project results as quickly as possible. Many specific questions such as the
following can be answered by having a complete and workable schedule:
• When will the project be complete?
• What is the earliest date a particular activity can start, and when will it end?
• What activity must begin before which other activities can take place?
• What would happen if a delivery of material was one week late?
• Can a key worker take a week of vacation the first week of March?
• If one worker is assigned to do two activities, which one must go first?
• How many hours do we need from each worker next week or month?
• Which worker or other resource is a bottleneck, limiting the speed of our project?
• What will the impact be if the client wants to add another module?
• If I am willing to spend an extra $10,000, how much faster can the project be
completed?
• Are all of the activities completed that should be by now?

Historical Development
Throughout history, projects have been performed, but many early projects such as cathedrals
in Europe took decades or longer to complete. As competition drove the need for more rapid
completion, systematic methods were developed for scheduling projects. In the 1950s, two
project scheduling methods were developed: program evaluation and review technique (PERT)
and critical path method. The critical path method (CPM) is “a method used to estimate the
minimum project duration and determine the amount of scheduling flexibility on the logical
network paths within the schedule model.
Both CPM and PERT were founded on the concepts still in place today of identifying activities,
determining their logical order, and estimating the duration for each. Networks representing
the activities were developed and the schedule calculated. Each of the techniques also boasted
a capability the other did not possess. PERT was developed in the Navy’s Special Program
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Office because the Navy was developing the large and complex Polaris Weapons System. To
complete it as quickly as possible, many activities needed to be worked on simultaneously.
Furthermore, many aspects of the Polaris used unproven technology. CPM was developed in
the Engineering Services Division of DuPont. DuPont needed to plan large projects when it
built and refurbished enormous plants. Planners using CPM estimated the time for each
individual work activity using a single time estimate. The focus was on understanding the
longest sequence of activities, which determined how long the project would take.

PERT and CPM originally used a method for displaying the work activities called activity on
arrow (AOA) or arrow diagramming method (ADM), in which schedule activities are
represented by arrows and connected at points called nodes. Because it is often confusing to
draw an accurate AOA network, this method is rarely used today. The more common method
used today is called activity on node (AON) or the precedence diagramming method (PDM).
AON or PDM is “a technique in which the scheduled activities are represented by nodes and
are graphically linked by one or more logical relationships to show the sequence in which the
activities are performed. A small project schedule is shown in figure with work activities A
through D connected by arrows showing logical relationships (A must be complete before B
and C can begin and both B and C must finish before D can begin).

How project schedules are limited and created

One way to understand project schedules and how they are constructed is to understand that
five factors may limit how fast a project can be completed:
1. Logical order
2. Activity duration
3. Resource availability
4. Imposed dates
5. Cash flow

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The first factor is the logical order in which activities need to be completed. For example, one
needs to dig a hole before cement can be poured in it. This is covered in the section on
sequencing activities.
The second factor is how long each individual activity will take. This is discussed in the
section on estimating activity duration. It includes methods for estimating durations, problems
with estimates, and remedies to those problems.
The third factor is how many key resources are available at specific points in the project. For
example, if six rooms were available to be painted at the same time, and fewer than six painters
were available, progress would be slowed. This is discussed in
The fourth factor is imposed dates. For example, a project working on a government contract
may not be able to start until the government’s new fiscal year, which starts on October 1.
The fifth and final factor is cash flow. Projects may not start until money is approved, but
progress may also be slowed until enough revenue arrives to cover expenses.

Develop Project schedules

You need to complete all of the scheduling processes discussed up to this point even if you use
Microsoft Project or another scheduling tool. At this point, you have defined, sequenced, and
estimated the duration for all the schedule activities. Now is the time to use all of this
information to develop a project schedule. Once the schedule is developed based upon this
information, resource needs and availability and cash flow constraints often extend the
proposed schedule, while imposed date constraints often suggest the need for schedule
compression.
The first major task in developing the project schedule is to identify the critical path, which is
“the sequence of activities that represents the longest path through the project, which
determines the shortest possible duration.
The two methods for determining the critical path are the two-pass and enumeration methods.
Each uses the same activity identification, duration estimate, and activity sequencing data but
processes the data in a different manner. While both determine the critical path, each also
determines other useful information.

Two-Pass Method
First or forward pass is “a critical path method technique for calculating the early start and
early finish dates by working forward through the schedule model from the project start. On
the forward pass, the project team starts at the beginning of the project and asks how soon each

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activity can begin and end. If the project is being scheduled with software, actual calendar dates
are used.
Early start date (ES): The earliest possible point in time on which uncompleted portions of a
schedule activity can start, based upon the schedule network logic, the data date, and any
schedule constraints
Early finish date (EF): The earliest possible point in time on which uncompleted portions of
a schedule activity can finish, based upon the schedule network logic, the data date, and any
schedule constraints
Late start date (LS): The latest possible point in time in which uncompleted portions of a
schedule activity can start, based upon the schedule network logic, the project completion date,
and any schedule constraints
Late finish date (LF): The latest possible point in time when the uncompleted portions of a
schedule activity can finish based upon the network logic, the project completion date, and any
schedule constraints.

SECOND OR BACKWARD PASS

The second pass is sometimes called the backward pass. The backward pass is “a critical path
method technique for calculating the late start and late finish dates by working backward
through the schedule model from the project end date.

When performing the backward pass, teams start at the end and work backward asking, “How
late can each activity be finished and started?” Unless there is an imposed date, the late finish
for the last activity during planning is the same as the early finish date.

Figure: FIRST OR FORWARD PASS

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Enumeration Method
The second method of determining the critical path is the enumeration method. To complete
this, a person lists or enumerates all of the paths through the network. The advantage of this
method is that since all of the paths are identified and timed, if a team needs to compress the
project schedule, they will know both the critical path and the other paths that may be nearly
critical. It is imperative to keep track of both critical and near-critical paths when compressing
a schedule.

Figure: SECOND OR BACKWARD PASS

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Uncertainty in Project Schedules
On some projects, it is easy to estimate durations of activities with confidence. On others, so
many uncertainties exist that managers have far less confidence in their ability to accurately
estimate. However, project managers still need to tell sponsors and clients how long they
believe a project will take and then be held accountable for meeting those dates.
One common strategy for handling this potential problem is to construct the best schedule
possible and then manage the project very closely. A different strategy is to estimate a range of
possible times each individual activity may take and then see what impact that has on the entire
schedule. PERT and Monte Carlo are two methods sometimes used for this approach.

Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)

Program evaluation and review technique was developed during the 1950s to better understand
how variability in the individual activity durations impacts the entire project schedule. To use
PERT, a project team starts by sequencing the activities into a network
However, instead of creating one estimate for the time to complete each activity, they would
create three estimates: optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic. For example, the first activity,
“Determine new product features,” will most likely take five days, but it could take as little as
four days if everything works well and as long as 12 days if a variety of things interfere. The
person scheduling the project then calculates the estimated time to perform each activity as
shown in figure

The primary advantage of PERT is that it helps everyone realize how much uncertainty exists
in the project schedule. When people use single time estimates, sometimes there is a tendency
to believe that the estimates foretell exactly what will happen. On many projects, a great deal
of uncertainty exists, and PERT helps to make this visible.

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Monte Carlo Simulation
Monte Carlo simulation is “a process which generates hundreds of thousands of probable
performance outcomes based on probability distributions for cost and schedule on individual
tasks. The outcomes are then used to generate a probability distribution for the project as a
whole. Monte Carlo is more flexible than PERT, in that an entire range of possible time
estimates can be used for any activity. The project schedule is calculated many times (perhaps
1,000 or more), and each time the estimate for a particular activity is generated based upon the
likelihood of that time as determined by the project manager.

For example, suppose a project manager estimated that for a particular activity there was a 10
percent chance of taking five days, a 30 percent chance of taking six days, a 40 percent chance
of taking seven days, and the remaining 20 percent chance of taking eight days. Then for each
100 times the computer generated a project schedule, when it came to that activity, 10 times it
would choose five days, 30 times it would choose six days, 40 times it would choose seven
days, and 20 times it would choose eight days. The output from the computer would include a
distribution of how often the project would be expected to take each possible length of time.
Many other possible outputs can also be generated from Monte Carlo simulations.

Gantt Chart
A Gantt chart is a popular project management tool used to visually represent a project
schedule. Gantt charts not only show the timeline and status of a project but also who’s
responsible for which task in a particular project. The chart helps to show the progress of the
project, identify any delays, and track the critical path.
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A Gantt chart can capture the following details about a project:
• The broken-down tasks.
• Beginning and end of each task.
• Duration for each task.
• People assigned to each task.
• When important meetings, approvals, or deadlines need to happen.
• The progress happening on the project.
• The complete project schedule from start to finish.

Sections of a Gantt Chart:

• The Gantt chart is divided into the following sections:
• Task List:
• Timeline:
• Task Bars
• Dateline:
• Bars:
• Milestones:
• Dependencies:
• Progress:
• Resource assigned:
A much easier to understand tool for communicating a project schedule is a Gantt or bar chart.
A Gantt chart is “a bar chart of schedule information where activities are listed on the vertical
axis, dates are shown on the horizontal axis, and activity durations are shown as horizontal bars
placed according to start and end dates.

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