Discussion and responses | Operations Management homework help

Part 1: Read “Suburban Homes Construction Project” at the end of Chapter 1 and then answer the Question at the end of the case (p. 27 of the textbook).

Submit your answer in the Discussion Forum and then submit peer replies regarding their answers (200 word minimum for each peer reply).  Please note the netiquette rules as located in the left column of this screen.  Click on “Netiquette” and read the instructions.

Responses of other students will be posted once i post this discussion

Part 2: Answer the PMBOK® Guide Questions at the end of Chapter 1 in the textbook.  (PMBOK = A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge ( PMBOK® Guide)–Sixth Edition, Project Management Institute, Inc., 2017)

Submit your answers in the PMBOK® Guide Questions Discussion Forum,  observe how your peers answered the questions, and then collaborate with your peers about the correct answers by submitting peer replies.  Your initial post should have the question numbers and your answers beside them.  

Please look to the Netiquette rules by clicking the “Netiquette” tab in the left column of this screen.  

(PMBOK is a registered mark of the Project Management Institute, Inc.)

Responses:

Post 1:  

The main advice I would like to offer Adam Smith would be to understand the needs and purpose of the project. As the article mentions, the company’s mission is to formalize project management practices by developing and implementing standard and promising processes, tools and techniques. Adam Smith needs to identify the crucial factors which contribute towards improving the performance of project management and increasing project success rate. Some such factors to be kept in mind is as follows.

1. Safety: The first and most important factor for the project to be successful is safety. Even if the project is under budget and on schedule, the project is a failure if there is one injured person on the site. Adam Smith could develop an Injury Illness Prevention Plan elaborating the risks and ways to avoid any incident on the jobsite. Other ways could be Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan (SWPPP) and Best Maintenance Practices (BMP) could be developed and implemented to keep up with the standards on the jobsite, ultimately make the work environment safe.
2. Client Requirements: Regular weekly meetings with the client would show the client how the project is progressing, and the client’s requirements can be discussed just to make sure nothing is missed. This way, the client is satisfied and confident on the project progress.  
3. Budget and Schedule: Adam Smith can work on developing a project progress report template and implement the use of this template monthly for the duration of the project so as to firstly track the budget where the comparison for the percentage project completed vs the remaining budget to finish the project is shown to analyze if the project is progressing successfully. Secondly, the project progress report helps track the critical path impacts and the progression through the milestones can be shown.
4. Risk Assessment: Adam Smith can assign a resource dedicated to identifying any possible risks to the project and preventing the risks by addressing them with possible solutions. This way even if an initial risk assessment plan is made, any issues that arise during the construction can be addressed pro-actively.  

These could be some of the possible factors to be considered towards improving the performance of the project management and increasing project success rate.

Post 2:  

Even though Adam has so much experience, but it is still vital for him to understand the company’s current scenario with regards to project management. He should know that he would be working with multiple teams and people from different technical skills such as architects, labors, customers, vendors, suppliers, etc.

He must understand the following things before he can implement any changes or enhancements to any of them

• Long term and short term goals
•  Understand and identify their vendors, stakeholders, and other customers
• Available resources
• Tools used 

After getting a good idea about the company, he can deep dive into following project management concepts:

• Scope of work: How can he achieve and improve the scope of work. Define various milestones, reports needed, and results expected. Understand the terms and conditions.
• Streamlining the process: It would be beneficial if he defines some ground rules and guidelines based on the types of houses and locations. Learn how the money will flow and payments can be made.
• Resource availability: Understand what is available and what is needed and see if it is feasible such as workforce, machinery, budget, etc.

 After that, he can follow the project life cycle:

• Project Initiation: high-level planning, set the start and end date of the project, define the preliminary plan, identify relevant stakeholders, make commitments
• Planning phase: Once the available resources are identified, he can perform detailed planning. Perform risk analysis, study environmental impacts, and how can it be prevented, identify the hazardous conditions and how to suffice them. Gathered all the data from different teams, 
• Executing: Assign work to various groups, make use of all the resources, monitor the progress, and compare to its timelines, streamline the process, identify the bottleneck. Get the approvals, 
• Closing: Signing off the project to the customer is one of the most critical steps because that is where is your work is rated. Noting down the lessons learned, payments, reassigning the resources, appreciating the suitable jobs. 

During this above process, the project must be cost-effective and profitable. 

• Get cheaper labor
• Good quality but affordable materials
• Make the optimize use of the available resources by using the concept of planning and scheduling
• Using reusable products