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Projects and Project Management
Published in Davies A. Igberaese, Introduction to Project Management, 2023
The project manager is the head of the project team. Other project team members carry out tasks or group of tasks assigned to them by the project manager with agreed deliverables and timelines. Team members are expected to take responsibility for their own tasks but report to the project manager. The structure of the team is designed to conform to the work breakdown structure (WBS). The WBS shows all the tasks that make up the project scope to which resources (including human resources) required to carry out each task can be allocated. The team is vital to the project, as it is the team that makes things happen on the project. Hence, it is important for the team members to have the right skills and experience for the needs of the project. A team’s skill matrix is a useful tool to check that their skill sets would be adequate for successful project delivery.
Overview of Quality in Oil and Gas Projects
Published in Abdul Razzak Rumane, Quality Management in Oil and Gas Projects, 2021
Each phase can further be subdivided on work breakdown structure (WBS) principle to reach a level of complexity where each element/activity can be treated as a single unit, which can be conveniently managed. WBS represents a systematic and logical breakdown of the project phase into its components (activities). It is constructed by dividing the project into major elements with each of these being divided into sub-elements. This is done till a breakdown is done in terms of manageable units of work for which responsibility can be defined. WBS involves envisioning the project as a hierarchy of goal, objectives, activities, sub-activities, and work packages. The hierarchical decomposition of activities continues until the entire project is displayed as a network of separately identified and nonoverlapping activities. Each activity will be single purposed, of a specific time duration, and manageable; its time and cost estimates will be easily derived, deliverables will be clearly understood, and responsibility for its completion will be clearly assigned.
Project management
Published in Andrew Greasley, Absolute Essentials of Operations Management, 2019
The purpose of the project planning stage is to ensure that the project objectives of cost, time and quality are met. It does this by estimating both the level and timing of resources needed over the project’s duration. These steps may need to be undertaken repeatedly in a complex project due to uncertainties and to accommodate changes as the project progresses. The project management method uses a systems approach to deal with a complex task in that the components of the project are broken down repeatedly into smaller tasks until a manageable chunk is defined. Each task is given its own cost, time and quality objectives. It is then essential that responsibility is assigned to achieving these objectives for each particular task. This procedure should produce a work breakdown structure (WBS), which shows the hierarchical relationship between the project tasks. A typical WBS will have at the top level the project and at the bottom level the individual work package. A work package is an individual work element that can be accurately defined, budgeted, scheduled and controlled. Between the top and bottom levels, various categories can be defined. These categories are usually organized in a product-oriented fashion but may be task oriented for service operations such as design or management.
Developing work breakdown structure matrix for managing offsite construction projects
Published in Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 2018
Monty Sutrisna, Chamila D. D. Ramanayaka, Jack S. Goulding
In managing the offsite (manufacturing processes) and on site construction, theWBS has been applied to model their processes. The WBS has been used to describe a hierarchical representation of the work to be executed by the project team, usually represented in a ‘top-down’ orientation (Siami-Irdemoosa, Dindarloo, & Sharifzadeh, 2015; Perdicoúlis, 2013) and has been widely recognised as a powerful project management tool for better performance control (Hartmann et al., 2012; Wu, Schmidt, & Wigstrom, 2010; Chua & Godinot, 2006). Thus its ability to define the scope and structure of the project and establishes the foundation for planning, budgeting, responsibility assignment, project control and information management has earned the WBS reputation as the most valuable tool for project management (Garcia -Fornieles, Fan, Perez, Wainwright, & Sehdev, 2003). Whilst the relatively recent scholarly development [particularly in lean construction, [e.g. Koskela, Huovila, and Leinonen (2002); Ballard (2000)] includes criticisms to the ‘classic project management’ theory in which WBS serves as a fundamental concept to decompose projects, this research subscribes to a more reconciling few of Winch (2006) that the lean construction including its Last Planner system still consists of decomposition of the project through value stream mapping and process flow charting. Thus the difference is mainly in the subsequent procedures and not in the act of decomposition of the project itself.
A review of methods, techniques and tools for project planning and control
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2018
Robert Pellerin, Nathalie Perrier
In the early project phase, the structure of the project is usually represented at an aggregated level as a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), which decomposes the project into manageable activities, and on a detailed level as a precedence diagram to represent the technological and execution dependencies between the activities of the project. To this end, the activities are linked by means of precedence relations. It is worth mentioning here that most project control techniques assume the very strict hypothesis of linear relations between the activities. In practice, however, projects are usually executed in an accelerated mode, by overlapping phases (such as the engineering with the procurement and construction phases), in order to deliver projects more quickly (Berthaut et al. 2014). The idea behind overlapping is to relax the sequential execution of dependent activities by rescheduling activities in parallel. While theoretically proper modelling of overlapping activities with traditional precedence relationships is impossible, continuous precedence relations can now accommodate for this issue (Hajdu 2015). At the project network level, the time required to perform each activity is also estimated, based on a stated resource level required (manpower, machinery, etc.) for each activity. Given the network and the duration of the activities, the earliest and latest start and finish times of the activities are then calculated and a resource profile showing the amount of resource capacity required over time is generated. Project scheduling is often seen as the last step of the initial project planning cycle. This step corresponds to the generation of a baseline schedule, where the activities are ordered subject to finite capacities of resources.
Work breakdown structure application for man-hours calculation in hull construction shipbuilding in Malaysia
Published in Cogent Engineering, 2019
W. A. Z. Wan Abd Rahman, N. I. Mohd Zaki, M. K. Abu Husain
It has been demonstrated that the WBS is important in simplifying complicated projects into small components that are easy to manage and plan. A project manager will notice the importance of WBS in managing the project. A good WBS will make the project more predictable in terms of schedule and cost. PWBS in Shipbuilding Project is the most common WBS useful tool used by shipyard during project construction stage to date. Man-hours estimated by an expert in the shipyard is still useful for easy estimation since the historical data is a good source for estimating.