BUS 528 - Chapter 9 Ideas

Chapter 9 Balancing the Trade-off among Cost, Schedule, and Quality – Ideas
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1. Three most common project constraints:
a. Time
b. Money
c. Resources
If one or more of these constraints is a factor, the project will need to be balanced: that is, the balance between the cost, schedule, and quality of the product will need to be reconsidered.
2. Three levels of balancing a project:
Balancing a project can take place at one of three different levels of authority in an organization, depending on the kind of change needed:
a. Project
b. Business case
c. Enterprise

3. Balancing at the project level
a. Re-estimate the project
This is the “optimist’s choice”. This involves checking your original assumptions in the statement of work and the work package estimates. Perhaps your growing knowledge of the project will allow you to reduce your pessimistic estimates.
b. Change task assignments to take advantage of schedule float
It involves moving people to critical path tasks from tasks that are not on the critical path in order to reduce the duration of the critical path.
c. Add people to the project
d. Increase productivity by using experts from within the firm
e. Increase productivity by using experts from outside the firm
f. Outsourcing the entire project or a significant portion of it
g. Crashing a schedule
h. Working overtime

4. Balancing at the business case level
This reevaluation requires the authorization of all the stakeholders.
a. Reduce the product scope
b. Fixed-phase scheduling
c. Fast-tracking
d. Phased product delivery
e. Do it twice – quickly and correctly
f. Change the profit requirement

5. Balancing at the enterprise level
Enterprise-level balancing mainly confronts the constraints of insufficient equipment, personnel, and budget. At the enterprise level, the firm decides which projects to pursue, given finite resource.
The alternatives that are successful at the enterprise level are variations of the ones applied at the project ad business case levels:
a. Outsourcing
b. Phased product delivery
c. Shifting work to the customer
d. Reducing product scope
e. Using productivity tools