IT Project Management
Lab 2: Project Estimates and Tracking (MS Project)
Description:
An IT project manager (PM) is accountable for the success of the IT project. One of the primary responsibilities the PM has is the monitoring and tracking of the three constraints of the IT project: Scope, Schedule and Cost. Toward this end, the PM must firstly work with the project team to develop truthful system requirements and, based on the requirements, reasonable estimates for schedule and cost. Accurate estimates are the keys for any PMs to have theirprojects completed on-time, within budget, while still maintaining the scope.
In this lab, you will develop the schedule and cost estimates. Based on the high-level description of your project, as the PM, you will ask your team member to develop individual schedule. You team may use any estimation techniques learned in the lecture to produce the estimate for their works. After you collect the schedule estimates from your team member, you will compile them into an overall project schedule. You will also produce, based on your organizational cost for staff-month, the total cost estimate for the project.
Procedure:
1. Use the Lab report template to create the work products required for this lab.
2. We will start with a bottom-up approach for your estimates. Based on the work products for the IT project, ask your team members in different technical disciplines to provide you their estimates in terms of number of work day.
a. The team members in technical disciplines are members in your project charter that function as system engineering, coding, testing, and any other technical development work (Don’t forget to include yourself.)
b. You and your team members may use any estimation techniques learned in the lecture.
3. As the PM of the IT project, you will compile the estimates you received from your team and create the overall project schedule estimate. Note that you may use waterfall SDLC with or without overlapping in phases. The overall project schedule should be presented in both of the following two formats:
a. Gantt chart with MS Project or MS Excel 2016
b. Spreadsheet and bar chart in MS Excel
4. Next, you will develop the cost estimate for your project.
a. Assuming that your organization cost for each staff-month is $15k. Each staff-month is equivalent to 21.5 days
b. Calculating your labor cost by adding all people-day in the estimates you received from step 2.
c. Calculating other cost, such as hardware, software, network, and service subscription necessary for your project.
d. Adding all cost to produce your final project cost estimate. You may use spreadsheet or table in word file.
5. Now we will work on a top-down approach. Assuming that your sponsor is willing to pay up to $1,500,000 for developing the project in 6 months (a firm constraint). Based on the work products for the IT project, create a WBS and carefully allocate the schedule and cost estimates. Your estimates should be rational to your statement of work.
a. The start and end dates of the schedule can be flexible, but the period of the schedule must be less than or equal to 6 months in Gantt chart and spreadsheet.
b. Use the same organization cost for each staff-month in step 4.
c. The total number of staff calculated with the estimates can be more or less than your project charter.
Notes and Suggestions:
You should focus on project management and not project implementation. Therefore, the feasibility of the project is not a concern. You may use assumption and/or risk to address the feasibility issues. Each document should maintain a version history.
Lab report:
Your report should include all information required to be noted in the procedure, any problems/issues you encountered during the lab and how did you resolve them.