Project Management Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

The minimum expected time for each project activity:

1.      Requirements

This includes the planning for all physical and intellectual resources required to initiate the project with preliminary guidelines. The company needs to allocate an appropriate amount of time to gather suitable human resource that includes software engineers and web developers who considerably prepare a framework that consist of a set of instruction for developing certain attributes of the product. These attributes will define the quality, reliability and workability of the product.

The management has allocated three weeks to gather all the requirements essential for the development of the project. With the help of critical path analysis the longest route identified by the project manager starts from accumulation of requirements. The time estimated for collecting requirements will be three weeks, whereas the crash time decided by the project manager is also three weeks hence there is no need to crash requirement collection time as it is already present on its optimum level neither any additional cost would be applied to this activity.

  • 2.      DESIGN

After the data collection part the most important step in the development of the product is the designing of that product. This includes the innovative features of the products, essential requirement are then converted into tangible ideas. Design actually includes the artistic development of the product which suggest the arrangement of the several tiny graphics.

The normal or estimated time calculated by the project manager is six weeks maximum however the management wants to shorten this time up to the level where they can align this activity’s schedule with remaining time left, to meet the deadline of the project that will be of 35 weeks.For this the manager have taken the difference between the normal and crash time as the timethat needsto be eliminated from the normal duration in  which the  design of the software will be  going to finalized.

The additional cost requires to speed up the working of this activity would be $30,000 per week, which means that if the task would be completed one week before then the additional cost would be $ 30,000.

  • 3.      DEVELOPMENT

 

It is the most essential part in the making of the product which converts all intangible information and ideas gathered through primary and secondary date collection method intotangible. After which the product has almost appeared in its complete form that is almost ready for the market forsale. In this process the engineer focus on the needs and wants of the end user sensitively so that the product could be user friendly and meet all their demands properly. As this process needs extreme attention from the developer so the management has estimated a large amount of time to it.

If the project manager plans to minimize the time allocated for the development of the project, thenit would be an obvious thing that he is compromising on the quality of development of the product which will bring the whole effort of the entire team at stake and will create high costfor the management. This cost would be more harmful because if the customer will not be satisfied from it then they will never go to buy it again and also make complaints for it that will be going to affect the company’s reputation directly.

Hence the company should not reduce the estimated time allocated for this activity. However, this activity does not require to be fasten so there would not be any extra expense incurring on this task.

  • 4.      TESTING

 

After the development part, it is extremely important to test the product on the selected sample of the target market. The test is highly recommended for the application of the softwarebeforethe software house launches it in the market. Through the testing part all the initial lacking of the software would be revealed to the manager and before the software’s final sale they would go to encounter the lope-holes present in the software.Project Management Case Solution

It is highly recommended to quickly implement the project to the selected sample size and take the feedback from them in a more speedy way. The estimated time allocated for this was eight weeks by the management team, however due to its Significance the management also wants to complete it in 8 weeks. So that on the basis of this pilot testing all the weaknesses of the software would be removed before it entersthe market.Hence estimated and crash time issame, so there will not be an additional cost applied to it. The management estimates this time through the method of crash cost estimation..............................

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