150 words to each discussion

apa format

Discussion 1

The concept that I considered to be most important in our chapter readings was project success. I believe that the completion of a job or a project doesn’t truly show that job was successful. You may have finished it on time, but not within budget, or within budget and not on time. Most importantly, you may have completed the job in your perspective, but the customer was not satisfied with the results.

Having a successful project takes a lot of planning, budgeting, efficiency, and communication. Being able to carry on a job with those things in mind and executing them will give you the results you and your customer want. The customer satisfaction is always the most important part of the finalization of a project, it is what closes the project in my point of view. In the end of the day, it is the customer that is paying you for what they want. Reaching the project’s goal on time, within budget and with the customer happy is the main objective of a project manager.

There are many obstacles that will try to stop you from reaching that goal. Which is one of the main reasons why a project manager needs to be prepared for every situation that can arise. In order to have a smooth project, a project manager has to be consistent, communicate with his employees, be a leader, motivate, and most importantly have the ability to solve problems. Most days you will encounter a problem, how quickly and effective you solve them can determine if a job can be successful or not.

I started an internship at a construction company this week, and I have been shadowing one of the superintendents of the company. In the few days that I’ve been there I noticed that the slightest mistake can delay you a day on building a house. Today, we had inspections on some of the houses that the company is building. Some were gas inspections, others were water and pluming, but in of the houses that was being inspected was something missing. On the gas inspection, there has to be a rod sticking from the ground connected to the house on the outside. Everything else, passed the test, but just because the rod was missing from the ground, the company couldn’t continue other parts of the construction until the inspector came back and cleared the gas inspection.

Little things like that can cost you a day that you were probably trying to save in case of a real emergency, equipment malfunction or really bad weather. Those little things can accumulate and create chaos on proceeding as plan with scheduling contractors to do their parts and can make you miss a deadline. Another thing that happened today was that one of the inspectors didn’t show up, in that case that is something that will delay, but it is just out of our control.

One thing that I’ve learned is that one of the most effective ways to make your employees or laborers more efficient is by rewards. If you’re able to align goals with incentives, you can motivate your employees to be more efficient, maximizing the use of all your resources. Eventually it will start saving materials, time, and expenses, giving you the result of a successful project. If you’re able to control all these things, you will be guaranteed customer satisfaction. Even Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said that if you obsess with customer satisfaction instead of obsessing with your competition, you will be successful.

Discussion 2

This week’s assigned reading material introduced the definition of a project as a new, unique, and temporary endeavor that creates a unique product (or service) (Watt, 2019, p. 12). The author also clearly mentions that routine business activities that do not have specified end dates are not considered to be projects and are instead part of business operations (Watt, 2019, p. 11). Knowing the differences between projects and operations is vital for project management professionals.

For example, in the automotive sector, the routine manufacturing operations of vehicles to meet customer orders are considered as business operations. However, the process of creating the vehicles, which includes R&D activities, computer-aided design of concepts, and the testing of tooling and equipment capable of performing per mass-production demands, are new projects. New model activities can cost automakers several hundred million to billions of dollars (Shea, 2010). Automakers are also constrained to a time frame of a few years to develop new vehicles to ensure that their vehicles have an advantage over their competitors in terms of technology and features, thereby limiting the timeframe available for new model activities. These activities terminate when the first batch of mass-produced vehicles gets delivered to dealerships. Considering that new products get created, the limitations on their timespan, and the exact definitions of achievement of objectives, these activities are projects. Most automakers and suppliers collectively term these activities as new product introduction (NPI) or new model launch projects.

Another important topic discussed in the reading material is the various types of measures used to quantify the level of success of a project. Watt (2019, p.15) portrays these measures in the form of a triple-constraint triangle that consists of scope, costs, and schedule with quality encompassing each of them. Besides these factors, risks and resource availability are important factors that contribute to a project’s success.

Project risks refer to events that negatively impact the project’s delivery (Watt, 2019, p. 14). If costs are reduced, with no changes to the scope or schedule, the quality level of the project reduces. The triple-constraint diagram suggests that pulling on one constraint might reduce quality. However, the author describes them to be in the form of a whack-a-mole configuration of level (Watt, 2019, p. 15). To convey risks, I think it might be easier to use a three-dimensional representation for the triple-constraint diagram, where costs, schedule, and scope are pillars for equal heights, and the project quality is a triangle balanced on these pillars. A risk can be represented by events that cause the pillars to change height dramatically and causes the quality to topple. Resources constitute people and equipment needed for the project activities. People take time to complete assigned activities and are paid a wage for their activities. Machines also require time to complete tasks and consume electricity. Hence, I think that resources get split into the cost and schedule factors in the triple-constraint diagram.

The knowledge of how to balance these factors is vital for project management professionals to ensure successful project completion, and thereby satisfy the project’s customers.