PROJ6003 Effective Project Management Assignment Sample

• Subject Code : PROJ6003
• University : Laureate International Universities My Assignment Services is not sponsored or endorsed by this college or university.
• Subject Name : Project Management 3

Project Execution and Control - Part A

Identify effective status reports used in project management. Discuss the challenges and pitfalls of different status reports. Considering the given case study, how might these reports be applied?

A project status report is a kind of document that helps in providing a summary of the progress of the overall project against the targeted project plan. 

The project status report aims to inform all the stakeholders about the progress of the project and this also offers in mitigating the issues before generating them and it will also make sure that the project will land within the stipulated time frame. 

A project status report also helps in offering the enhancement of communication among all parties such as the company, as everyone present in the loop as the project starts progressing. This will also help in making the communication easy and up to the mark with a single and formalized report that will help all the employees and employers to make them up to date. 

Moreover, a project status report helps in enhancing the support within the organization for the project by preserving the tight communication between all team members and to make sure to meet all the goals and objectives of the organization. 

How to identify effective status reports used in project management?

Several benefits are there to use the project report status in an organization. It helps in forcing the company to agree on milestones of certain projects and also helps in measuring the progress at the starting of the project of the specific project. The project manager helps in collecting the vital criteria and make a project status report that proves very beneficial for the ones who are in requirement. 

Transparency: 

All the accomplished and pending milestone points are covered inside the project status reports. It also indicates the issue that will be going to arrive on the project shortly. This offers transparency and trust. 

Identify and Prevent Risks: 

Risk management is the most important part of making project management. A project status report generally includes the explained overview of all the issues and risks. This can offer you great help in identifying and preventing risk at the early stage of the project. 

Resource management in a Better Way:

The status report offers benefits to track the progress of the project at a different status and that too in an early stage. This can provide help in shifting the resources, whether in or out of the project whenever required. 

Project health: 

The project status report also provides all the open issues that can be generated while creating the project and that too at an early stage. So, this provides the stakeholder to make high-level overview health of the project. If the health of the project is poor, then the manager can take action to correct all the errors. 

 Accountability: 

The project status report also provides transparency and the manager gets to know exactly where the project is lacking and in which part, the error is lying and what measures does it need to rectify the errors. This is called accountability. 

Budget creep: 

The project status report helps in providing the exact budget of the project, we get to know the project is off-budget or on- budget or we can check if there is any change request that leads to budget creep. It is important for project management. 

Apart from these points, the report also makes a paper trail of all the issues and problems. This can be used as handy if any future dispute takes place. 

So, the Project status report provides a generalization view and a more clear approach to get done any project and improve the tracking and making the progress of the project. The most important tool is to take time and effort to make this project report very effective. The above-discussed points should keep in mind while preparing the project status report very effectively. 

Challenges and pitfalls of different status reports:

Here are some challenges and pitfalls that one has to face while generating the project status report. 

1. The mangers and the executives cannot depend on the staff of the project and other employees to the information on accurate project reports and to talk about the project when they get to see any issue. The research of executives states that project management write reports are biased to 60 percent of the time and it is biased is twice as possible to be positive as negative. 
2. Various reasons are present that people can report the false data in the project status report; the reason can be any such as work climate and the norms of culture can play a bad role, personality traits in individuals. The author who is preparing the report can cite the irrelevant information sometimes and generate a wrong report based on the wrong data. 
3. Sometimes, the audit team can get very aggressive and the team unable to counter the effects of the status report by misreporting the gathered data and holding the information by staff of the project. The project team can hide the information from the auditors. It happens because of the lack of trust and it also influences the structure of internal reporting.
4. If any senior get a charge of the senior executive of the project report then most likely the status of the report be misreporting. The larger the power, the gap between the employee giving the status and the employee receiving the status, then there will be high chances of misreporting. 
5. Sometimes, executives don’t pay any heed to the bad news they heard. In most cases, if there is an issue and this issue needs to solve by the higher authority then this higher authority does not pay attention to it. The pressure of the project status report is more in the general employees, and the pressure is decreasing as the hierarchy of designations goes up. 

Yes, these reports can be applied to the given case study as the case study includes a lot of confusion and a lot of data regarding the public transport ticketing system. In the given case study, the Victorian Government’s 2002 Linking Victoria Policy committed to developing a new smartcard46 ticketing system to replace the existing Metcard ticketing system when the Metcard contract (former system) expired in 2007. So all the above-stated reports are highly required. 

Project Execution and Control - Part B

Risk identification and impact assessment risk identification and impact assessment is the process in which assessing the chances and probabilities and other challenges of risk events if any occurred. The outcomes of this assessment are used in giving the priority and establish them in order of risk of most critical to least critical order. This ranking helps in providing the insights to the project management and the executives can shift the resources wherever is a requirement. These resources can help in managing or mitigating the realization of a high chance of consequences when risk generated or occurred. 

If we talk about public transport ticketing systems then a lot of risks are generated while creating the tickets because sone risks are the most critical risks and some are the least critical risks. Risk impact assessment helps in prioritizing the risk. 

Risk Impact Assessment in public transport ticketing systems

In the very first step, the impact of every risk has to generate on the project and these all are assessed based on events that can influence the cost, time, schedule, and any objective of technical performance. Influences and impacts are not restricted to these areas but there are more areas in which the risks can occur, there are some political and economic consequences also that also need to be considered while identifying the impacts of risks. The possibility and chances of every risk that occurs in the transport ticketing system need to be assessed. This contains the utilize of subjective chance assessment techniques, specifically if the situation precludes a direct analysis of the changes by methods of objectives. The objective method can be of any type such as engineering analysis, modeling, and simulation. 

There are some subjective probability assessments also for assessing the risk that occurred while generating the ticket in the transport system. 

When there is a need to assess the risk, it is necessary to match all the impacts of assessment on the framework of design. Risks are generally assessed according to the cost, schedule, targets of technical performance, these are for all program management. Some programs may also contain compliance or impacts related to public and oversight. A famous author also offers an extensive set of approaches to rating the scale and measuring the assessments based on the multicriteria and to amalgamate them all impacts and consequences as well. These rating scales offer a great and consistent for deriving the impacts of risks in all the levels across the cost, timeframe, schedule, performance, and all the remaining criteria that are necessary for the project. Moreover, the Matrix of risk can also solve and it will also help in evaluating the risk in all specific program of generating the ticket so that it will produce the ticket according to the seat and according to the candidates who want to travel. Using POET and p stand for Political, O stand for Operational, E stands for Economic, and T stands for Technical and one can also SWOT use to reduce the risks, where S stands for Strengths, w stands for Weaknesses, O stands for Opportunities, and T stands for Threats. 

Risk management and reporting

Risk management is an approach to identify, assess, and control all the threats to a company’s earnings and capital. These threats generally occurred from a wider variety of resources, containing uncertainties related to finance, liabilities related to legal, errors in strategic management, other accidents, and related to natural calamity and disasters.

Some points need to take care of external frameworks such as good internal control, identification, and management of risks and also the need for internal control functions. 

The risk can be defined as the chances of a negative derivation from a targeted financial result. The Victorian Government’s 2002 Linking Victoria Policy committed through its business activities can get involved in different kinds of risks such as credit risk, time risk, market risk, liquidity risk, and operational risk. All other risks that can be occurred are concentration risk, business risk, strategic risk, reputational risk, remuneration risk, and schedule risk.

Risk reporting 

The reporting of risk can be varied from company to company, it is difficult to find out the exact definition of the risk reporting to write down. 

It is very essential to manage the risks of daily management and making the decision of a company. Hence it plays an important role that management and the board of the company should take care of all the risks associated with the organization. This is the way for all the board members and senior executives to get to know about the organization in on track or not and can the organization accomplish its objectives. 

The report that is generated of risk should not include the benefits provided by the card myki card. This card offers a lot of benefits such as it is easy to use, the payment option and purchase are very convenient, it is very efficient in terms of boarding the train, it provides the high-quality data if planning for travel, it has options to change and the driver also use different patterns of pricing and fare. These are benefits and this is the reason why people use this myki card. If these points are risks generated then no one going to buy the ticket. This is the reason, the project status report generated so that all the risks and errors can be addressed at an early stage. 

References for Project Execution and Control

Heldman, K. (2013). PMP Project Management Professional Exam Study Guide (7th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley

Project Management Institute. (2013). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK Guide®) (5th ed.). Newtown Square, Pennsylvania: Project Management Institute.

Brouwer, G. E. (November, 2011). Own motion investigation into ICT-enabled projects – In consultation with the Victorian Auditor-General. OMBUDSMAN.

Victorian Auditor-General Office (June, 2015). Victorian Auditor-General’s Report - Operational Effectiveness of the myki Ticketing System. Victorian Government. Retrieved from https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/file_uploads/20150610-myki_bn23fyLd.pdf

Snyder, C. S. (2013). A project manager’s book of forms: A companion to the PMBOK guide (2nd ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Wysocki, R. K. (2012). Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme (6th ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Wiley.

Chemuturi, M. (2013). Mastering IT Project Management: Best practices, tools and techniques. Retrieved from https://lesa.on.worldcat.org/oclc/869302200

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