K90012 Construction Project Management and Project Planning

Project Planning

Considering the previous presentation, the project definition and planning is going to be completed till 224^th December 2018. Considering this, the project execution phase needs to be initiated. The monitoring and controlling phases have been divided in two phases including during the project execution and after project execution (Colin and Vanhoucke 2015). The baseline set in the project includes the following project details:

In order to get success in the project plan, the project manager should plan the entire project properly as per the client’s and project requirements. It is done throughout drawings the project plan, scope, schedule as well as project cost of the project. It is also required to calculate the project budget, resources required and project schedule (Batselier and Vanhoucke 2015). The project plan is based on encompassing of such technology that helps in sharing documents and edited pictures to team for keeping the project team members updated to the project. The company facilitates to plan, document and accelerate field inspections, safety, quality of work and update and manage the project procurement (Batselier and Vanhoucke 2017). In order to control and monitor the project plan, the company stores and access the files on time, track the project progress, help to create reports and track the construction progress. The scope of this project plan is to establish best application with high features of editing, managing the team, sharing and statistics of the project work. The team members are motivated to aid people for keeping track of the construction work (Colin and Vanhoucke 2015). It enhances and manages the team work and keeps the team members up to the date.

The project plan benefits in various ways due to implementation of application in Construct X-pro. At the planning stage, when the project is approved, then the project team can assemble the project team and start plan how to manage the entire project work to achieve the project goals in estimated budget as well as on time (Kerkhove and Vanhoucke 2017). The project manager is required to analyze the scope statement and project deliverables, objectives. The project manager can break down the project deliverables in smaller ones which help to manage the team. All the project tasks are analyzed on time and allocated to the project team members focused on skills as well as expertise. The project manager determines duration of project tasks and set the dates of project completion (Kim et al. 2015). The project cost is estimated which is involved across the project as well as formulate of project budget. The project quality objectives are to be meeting through the project work. Roles and responsibilities of the project team members are done so that all the project tasks are allocated among them (Webb 2017). The project risks are also determined so that there should not be any huge impact and influence on the project work.

In order to complete the project work on time, there should be control of the project activities, which ensures that the project is completed in scheduled time. When the deadline of project is missed and it is finished out of project sequence, then there is knock out effects on rest of the project plan (Chen, Chen and Lin 2016). It could be delivered late and as a result, there is high in project cost. Gantt chart is used to convey the project information to the project team members. It outlines the project tasks involved in the project work and showed the timescale of the project work. It will provide an overview of the entire project work, associated project activities and when it is to be finished within scheduled time. Most of the projects are failed due to underestimation of time as well as money as significant part of project work is overlooked (Fleming and Koppelman 2016). The technique which is used to avoid the problems and issues is work breakdown structure aids in process to determine the project scope, project activities and estimate budget.

Monitoring (on 24^th December 2018)

The MS project tool is used for calculating the earned value analysis on the above mentioned date considering the baseline set as per the above information. It is identified that the previous project growth was done as per the planning and hence, considering the above baseline, following Gantt chart is developed for representing the work being accomplished:

The first two phases of the project are completed 100% and hence the project initiation or definition have same bar for the percentage of the work delivered (Kim et al. 2015). Selecting the critical path, the above demonstrated activities determined the new list of activities as the critical activities.

Monitoring and Controlling (During Implementation)

It is necessary to assure that the project is being completed within the expected budget and schedule that can be analysed and identified using the earned value analysis as demonstrated in the next paragraph (Naeni, Shadrokh and Salehipour 2014). It allows the project manager to identify the previous, current, and future positions of the project with respect to the cost and schedule (Kerkhove and Vanhoucke 2017). Schedule variance (SV), Actual Cost (AC), Planned Value (PV), Estimate at Completion (EAC), and Cost variance (CV) can be measured in manner to identify the rest of the factors related to the project growth and development (Abdi,Taghipour and Khamooshi 2018). Based on these values the following earned value can be calculated:

Earned Value Analysis

The earned value analysis (EVA) is considered as project controlling procedure which is termed as key performance indicators of the project work. With EVA, the planned as well as current project cost is being identified on reporting date and earned value. Based on the earned value, the future course of project plan plus predicted completion cost is being calculated before end of the project work (Abdi, Taghipour and Khamooshi 2018). EVM is the project management method to measure project performance along with progress in the project objectives. It has capability to combine the measurements of project triple constraints such as scope, time and cost (Batselier and Vanhoucke 2015). The earned value management is provided proper forecasts of the project performance issues, which is important contribution for the project management. Required features for EVM implementation is included of:

• The project plan is identified the work to accomplish.
• Valuation of the planned work which is termed as planned value and budgeted cost for the work scheduled (Fleming and Koppelman 2016).
• Earning rules to quantify accomplishment of the project work termed as earned value and budgeted cost of the work performed.
• There s proper estimation of project variance based on time and cost (Kerkhove and Vanhoucke 2017).

Benefits of EVM for this project plan are as follows:

1. There is integration of the work, schedule as well as cost using the work breakdown structure.
2. There is getting of historical data from the completed project work so that it is used for the comparative analysis of the project work (Willems and Vanhoucke 2015).
3. There is estimation of cost as well as schedule performance index.

Authorized project work and resources are being integrated with use of product oriented work breakdown structure. It helps the company to coordinate as well as determine the contributions of the project area which will ensure the there is proper integration of the project schedule as well as project cost (Naeni, Shadrokh and Salehipour 2014). Managing as well as reporting of data across the system is not effective and effective, therefore EVM is resulted in faster reporting cycles and more time is required for the cost analysis. Importance of the project cost as well as project schedule is detectable when the planned work is being reached as little as there is 10% completion of the project work (Colin and Vanhoucke 2015). Therefore, there are issues related to project performance, productivity, schedule and cost.

In this project plan, the project will get success when EVM will keep the management on estimated budget and project cost. With use of this technique, the management will make sure that the project parameters are be on the track and the project will process their tasks as per scheduled time (Batselier and Vanhoucke 2015). It is presented that the project can track based on time and cost. Timely performance measurement ensures that the steps are to be taken to bring the project on track before it impacts the project work on a huge. Schedule and cost variance is required in the project which can cause difference among the projected baseline as well as actual project performance (Chen, Chen and Lin 2016). It is based on three different levels such as estimated to plan, plan to actual and estimate to actual.

The earned value analysis predicts, the project is going as per the schedule and is under budget. The further controlling should be based on the management of the rest of the activities as per the new critical path identified (Chen et al. 2016). The earned value graph can be represented as:)

Monitoring and Controlling (After Implementation)

The end customer satisfaction level can be measured for the post monitoring and controlling after the implementation (Webb 2017). The proposed project should allow the construction site’s representative to smoothly exchange the spreadsheet or data that has been calculated during the deployment of certain constructions. The other side users should be allowed to access the same data or information without any hurdle.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that the earned value management can allow the efficient and effective management of the project deliveries. It helped in analysing the past, present and future prediction of the project schedule and cost variances. These information can be used for developing the strategies those best suited as per the present information and meet the final objectives and goals of the project. This report was based on the monitoring and controlling of the project ‘construction application service construct X-Pro.’ The calculation demonstrates the variances, planned, value, earned value and others as per the assumption that the project was on time before the execution phase starts.

References

Abdi, A., Taghipour, S. and Khamooshi, H., 2018. Corrigendum to “A model to control environmental performance of project execution process based on greenhouse gas emissions using earned value management”[Int. J. Proj. Manag. 36 (3)(April 2018) 397-413]. International Journal of Project Management, 36(8), pp.1047-1049.

Batselier, J. and Vanhoucke, M., 2015. Empirical evaluation of earned value management forecasting accuracy for time and cost. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 141(11), p.05015010.

Batselier, J. and Vanhoucke, M., 2015. Evaluation of deterministic state-of-the-art forecasting approaches for project duration based on earned value management. International Journal of Project Management, 33(7), pp.1588-1596.

Batselier, J. and Vanhoucke, M., 2017. Improving project forecast accuracy by integrating earned value management with exponential smoothing and reference class forecasting. International journal of project management, 35(1), pp.28-43.

Chen, H.L., Chen, W.T. and Lin, Y.L., 2016. Earned value project management: Improving the predictive power of planned value. International Journal of Project Management, 34(1), pp.22-29.

Colin, J. and Vanhoucke, M., 2015. A comparison of the performance of various project control methods using earned value management systems. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(6), pp.3159-3175.

Fleming, Q.W. and Koppelman, J.M., 2016, December. Earned value project management. Project Management Institute.

Kerkhove, L.P. and Vanhoucke, M., 2017. Extensions of earned value management: Using the earned incentive metric to improve signal quality. International Journal of Project Management, 35(2), pp.148-168.

Kim, J., Koo, C., Kim, C.J., Hong, T. and Park, H.S., 2015. Integrated CO2, cost, and schedule management system for building construction projects using the earned value management theory. Journal of Cleaner Production, 103, pp.275-285.

Naeni, L.M., Shadrokh, S. and Salehipour, A., 2014. A fuzzy approach for the earned value management. International journal of project management, 32(4), pp.709-716.

Webb, A., 2017. Using earned value: a project manager's guide. Routledge.

Willems, L.L. and Vanhoucke, M., 2015. Classification of articles and journals on project control and earned value management. International Journal of Project Management, 33(7), pp.1610-1634.