BUSI 313 Week 8 Discussion Board Forum 4 Replies Example

Discussion Board Forum 4 Replies: Responding to Classmates on Performance Measurement and Closure

BUSI 313 Foundations of Project Management, Discussion Board Forum 4 Replies

Thread by [Student Name]

The classmates and their threads are composites; the research and Scripture cited are real.

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, you argued that earned value gives a reliable forecast of final cost and duration from the first status report. I agree that it gives early warning; my own Section 2 report showed a cost problem two months before the move date. The question is how much weight an early forecast can bear.

Vanhoucke and Vandevoorde (2007) ran thousands of simulated projects through competing duration-forecasting methods and found the answer shifted with timing: some methods held up well early but broke down near the end, when traditional schedule measures stop being informative. Lipke et al. (2009) suggest statistical methods that attach confidence ranges to the forecasts, which is more honest than reporting a single number. Their approach also gives the project manager a way to say when a forecast has become reliable enough to act on, rather than reacting to every month's change in the indexes.

In Luke, Jesus treats care with small responsibilities as the proving ground for larger ones (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Luke 16:10). Reporting a forecast with its uncertainty is a small faithfulness that protects a sponsor's large decisions.

Would your sponsor prefer a single estimate at completion or a range, and why? In my experience sponsors ask for one number, but a range with a most likely value tells them how much contingency to keep, which is the decision they actually need to make.

Reply to Ashley

Ashley, your thread described the lessons-learned meeting as the easy last step of closure. Holding the meeting is easy; using its results is not.

Williams (2008) surveyed practitioners and found that while many organizations conduct project reviews, few have effective ways of applying the lessons to later projects. Newell et al. (2006) studied project teams and found that review documents stored in databases were seldom consulted; useful knowledge spread mainly through people and conversations, not reports. A review that ends in a filed document may satisfy a checklist without changing anything. Williams also noted that the lessons organizations do capture tend to be technical, while lessons about people, politics and decision making, often the most valuable, are the hardest to write down and the easiest to lose. That suggests the closing review should spend as much time on how the team made decisions as on what went wrong technically.

Proverbs promises future wisdom to the person who heeds counsel and takes correction (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 19:20). Wisdom from a finished project only helps if someone carries it forward.

Could your organization assign each lesson to a person who will apply it on the next project, rather than to a report? In my clinic project, the lesson about inspecting subfloors will only help if the facilities manager who wrote it is involved in estimating the next renovation. Pairing each lesson with an owner and a date turns a meeting into a change, and it gives the next project manager a person to call rather than a document to search. That small change might be the most useful lesson of the whole course.

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Lipke, W., Zwikael, O., Henderson, K., & Anbari, F. (2009). Prediction of project outcome: The application of statistical methods to earned value management and earned schedule performance indexes. International Journal of Project Management, 27(4), 400-407. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2008.02.009

Newell, S., Bresnen, M., Edelman, L., Scarbrough, H., & Swan, J. (2006). Sharing knowledge across projects: Limits to ICT-led project review practices. Management Learning, 37(2), 167-185. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507606063441

Vanhoucke, M., & Vandevoorde, S. (2007). A simulation and evaluation of earned value metrics to forecast the project duration. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 58(10), 1361-1374. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602296

Williams, T. (2008). How do organizations learn lessons from projects, and do they? IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 55(2), 248-266. https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2007.912920