Aggregate planning

Aggregate planning is an operationalactivity which does an aggregate plan for the production process, in advance of 2 to 18 months, to give an idea to management as to what quantity of materials and other resources are to be procured and when, so that the total cost of operations of the organisation is kept to the minimum, over that period.






The quantity of outsourcing, subcontracting of items, overtime of labour, numbers to be hired and fired in each period and the amount of inventory to be held in stock and to be backlogged for each period are decided. All of these activities are done within the framework of the company ethics, policies, and long term commitment to the society, community and the country of operation.

Aggregate planning has certain prerequired inputs which are inevitable. They include:

• Information about the resources and the facilities available.


• Demand forecast for the period for which the planning has to be done.


• Cost of various alternatives and resources. This includes cost of holding inventory, ordering cost, cost of production through various production alternatives like subcontracting, backordering and overtime.


• Organisational policies regarding the usage of above alternatives.

Options for situations in which demand needs to be increased in order to match capacity include:

Pricing. Varying pricing to increase demand in periods when demand is less than peak. For example, matinee prices for movie theaters, off-season rates for hotels, weekend rates for telephone service, and pricing for items that experience seasonal demand.
Promotion. Advertising, direct marketing, and other forms of promotion are used to shift demand.
Back ordering. By postponing delivery on current orders demand is shifted to period when capacity is not fully utilized. This is really just a form of smoothing demand. Service industries are able to smooth demand by taking reservations or by making appointments in an attempt to avoid walk-in customers. Some refer to this as "partitioning" demand.
New demand creation. A new, but complementary demand is created for a product or service. When restaurant customers have to wait, they are frequently diverted into a complementary (but not complimentary) service, the bar. Other examples include the addition of video arcades within movie theaters, and the expansion of services at convenience stores.

Options which can be used to increase or decrease capacity to match current demand include:

Hire/lay off. By hiring additional workers as needed or by laying off workers not currently required to meet demand, firms can maintain a balance between capacity and demand.
Overtime. By asking or requiring workers to work extra hours a day or an extra day per week, firms can create a temporary increase in capacity without the added expense of hiring additional workers.
Part-time or casual labor. By utilizing temporary workers or casual labor (workers who are considered permanent but only work when needed, on an on-call basis, and typically without the benefits given to full-time workers).
Inventory. Finished-goods inventory can be built up in periods of slack demand and then used to fill demand during periods of high demand. In this way no new workers have to be hired, no temporary or casual labor is needed, and no overtime is incurred.
Subcontracting. Frequently firms choose to allow another manufacturer or service provider to provide the product or service to the subcontracting firm's customers. By subcontracting work to an alternative source, additional capacity is temporarily obtained.
Cross-training. Cross-trained employees may be able to perform tasks in several operations, creating some flexibility when scheduling capacity.
Other methods. While varying workforce size and utilization, inventory buildup/backlogging, and subcontracting are well-known alternatives, there are other, more novel ways that find use in industry. Among these options are sharing employees with counter-cyclical companies and attempting to find interesting and meaningful projects for employees to do during slack times.

Project Control Variables
Project Management tries to gain control over five variables:

Time - The amount of time required to complete the project. Typically broken down for analytical purposes into the time required to complete the components of the project, which is then further broken down into the time required to complete each task contributing to the completion of each component.

Cost - Calculated from the time variable. Cost to develop an internal project is time multiplied by the cost of the team members involved. When hiring an independent consultant for a project, cost will typically be determined by the consultant or firm's hourly rate multiplied by an estimated time to complete.

Quality- The amount of time put into individual tasks determines the overall quality of the project. Some tasks may require a given amount of time to complete adequately, but given more time could be completed exceptionally. Over the course of a large project, quality can have a significant impact on time and cost (or vice versa).

Scope- Requirements specified for the end result. The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish.

Risk- Potential points of failure. Most risks or potential failures can be overcome or resolved, given enough time and resources. According to some definitions risk can also be negative, meaning that there is an opportunity to e.g. complete the project faster than expected.

Three of these variables can be given by external or internal customers. The value(s) of the remaining variable(s) is/are then set by project management, ideally based on solid estimation techniques. The final values have to be agreed upon in a negotiation process between project management and the customer. Usually, the values in terms of time, cost, quality and scope are contracted.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management#Project_Management_activities

THE SPECIFICATION

Before describing the role and creation of a specification, we need to introduce and explain a fairly technical term: a numbty is a person whose brain is totally numb. In this context, numb means "deprived of feeling or the power of unassisted activity"; in general, a numbty needs the stimulation of an electric cattle prod to even get to the right office in the morning. Communication with numbties is severely hampered by the fact that although they think they know what they mean (which they do not), they seldom actually say it, and they never write it down. And the main employment of numbties world-wide is in creating project specifications. You must know this - and protect your team accordingly.
A specification is the definition of your project: a statement of the problem, not the solution. Normally, the specification contains errors, ambiguities, misunderstandings and enough rope to hang you and your entire team.
Thus before you embark upon the the next six months of activity working on the wrong project,
you must assume that a numbty was the chief author of the specification you received and you must read, worry, revise and ensure that everyone concerned with the project (from originator, through the workers, to the end-customer) is working with the same understanding. The outcome of this deliberation should be a written definition of what is required, by when; and this must be agreed by all involved. There are no short-cuts to this; if you fail to spend the time initially, it will cost you far more later on.
The agreement upon a written specification has several benefits:
the clarity will reveal misunderstandings
the completeness will remove contradictory assumptions
the rigour of the analysis will expose technical and practical details which numbties
normally gloss over through ignorance or fear
the agreement forces all concerned to actually read and think about the details
The work on the specification can seen as the first stage of Quality Assurance since you are looking for and countering problems in the very foundation of the project - from this perspective the creation of the specification clearly merits a large investment of time.
The places to look for errors in a specification are:
the global context: numbties often focus too narrowly on the work of one team and fail to consider how it fits into the larger picture. Some of the work given to you may actually be undone or duplicated by others. Some of the proposed work may be incompatible with that of others; it might be just plain barmy in the larger context.
the interfaces: between your team and both its customers and suppliers, there are interfaces. At these points something gets transferred. Exactly what, how and when should be discussed and agreed from the very beginning. Never assume a common understanding, because you will be wrong. All it takes for your habitual understandings to evaporate is the arrival of one new member, in either of the teams. Define and agree your interfaces and maintain a friendly contact throughout the project.
time-scales: numbties always underestimate the time involved for work. If there are no time-scales in the specification, you can assume that one will be imposed upon you (which will be impossible). You must add realistic dates. The detail should include a precise understanding of the extent of any intermediate stages of the task, particularly those which have to be delivered.
external dependencies: your work may depend upon that of others. Make this very clear so that these people too will receive warning of your needs. Highlight the effect that problems with these would have upon your project so that everyone is quite clear about their importance. To be sure, contact these people yourself and ask if they are able to fulfil the assumptions in your specification.
resources: the numbty tends to ignore resources. The specification should identify the materials, equipment and manpower which are needed for the project. The agreement should include a commitment by your managers to allocate or to fund them. You should check that the actual numbers are practical and/or correct. If they are omitted, add them there is bound to be differences in their assumed values.
PROVIDING STRUCTURE
Having decide what the specification intends, your next problem is to decide what you and your team actually need to do, and how to do it. As a manager, you have to provide some form of framework both to plan and to communicate what needs doing. Without a structure, the work is a series of unrelated tasks which provides little sense of achievement and no feeling of advancement. If the team has no grasp of how individual tasks fit together towards an understood goal, then the work will seem pointless and they will feel only frustration. To take the planning forward, therefore, you need to turn the specification into a complete set of tasks with a linking structure. Fortunately, these two requirements are met at the same time since the derivation of such a structure is the simplest method of arriving at a list of tasks

references:
http://oldeee.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art8.html

Evolutuion of Project Management

The History of Project Management
Project management began to take root only a few decades ago. It started in the early 1960s, businesses and other organizations began to see the benefit of organizing work around projects and to understand the critical need to communicate across multiple departments and professions.

The Early Years: Late 19th Century
The latter half of the 19th century, project management evolved from management principles. Large-scale government projects were the impetus for making important decisions that became management decisions. In this country, the first large organization was the transcontinental railroad, which began construction in the early 1870s. Suddenly, business leaders found themselves faced with the daunting task of organizing the manual labor of thousands of workers and the manufacturing and assembly of unprecedented quantities of raw material.

Early 20th Century
Efforts Near the turn of the century, Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) began his detailed studies of work. He applied scientific reasoning to work by showing that labor can be analyzed and improved by focusing on its elementary parts. He applied his thinking to tasks found in steel mills, such as shoveling sand and lifting and moving parts. The inscription on Taylor's tomb in Philadelphia attests to his place in the history of management: "the father of scientific management." Taylor's associate, Henry Gantt (1861-1919), studied in great detail the order of operations in work. His studies of management focused on Navy ship construction during WWI. His Gantt charts, complete with task bars and milestone markers, outline the sequence and duration of all tasks in a process. Gantt chart diagrams proved to be such a powerful analytical tool for managers that they remained virtually unchanged for nearly a hundred years. It wasn't until the early 1990s that link lines were added to these task bars depicting more precise dependencies between tasks.

Project Management Methods:

1. Gantt Chart - represents activities and their start and completion times, but not the relationships among different activities. Advantages of Gantt charts are their simplicity and their linearity. The reviewer can visually perceive the length of each activity.


Use Gantt chart at project scheduling stage to

• Assess time characteristics to a project
• Show the task order
• Define resources involved
• Show links between scheduled tasks

Use Gantt chart at project planning stage to

• Monitor project completion
• Display the results of correctional activities
• Show links between scheduled tasks
  
  Gantt Chart examples:
  
  
  Gantt Chart - Presentation
  
  
  Gantt Chart - Schedule
  
  
  
  Gantt Chart - Marketing
  
  
  2. PERT(Project Evaluation and Review Technique)Chart - shows events, the activities required to reach the events, and the events, and the interdependencies among activities. The events are usually completion milestones. Advantages of PERT Charts is that the viewer can easily see the interdependencies among activities. So that possible bottlenecks and alternative paths to an event can easily be visualized. Like Gantt charts, PERT charts clearly show parrallel processes. However, PERT charts can also show a critical path that must be completed before the project.
  
  Pert Chart examples:
  
  
  
  
  
  Management information Systems(Second Edition) Author: Effy Oz
  Project Management Eighth Edition Author: Dennis Lock Gower
  
  
  Members:
  Jonas Galileo Belocura
  Rivero, Roy Van R.
  Marriane Charmaine Lequip

PROJECT MANAGEMENT INTRODUCTION

Pre-post:Confession of an Anxious Mind (not included in the project)

It’s quite unusual to manage this kind of activity. We’ll be doing a task that is subject to some kind a “redundancy” thing. Why? We are just to manage a project that will highlight the environment of project management. It seems analogous to planning how to plan. Confusing? Yes, indeed. However, this project has challenged us so much, specially these days, there are lots of external factors to consider-time; finance; availability of medium to be used and etc. – still management. And, if these things will not be managed, this project will probably accelerate to failure. Nevertheless, we are still very thankful to the topic being assigned to us because this project itself will fill the bank of our knowledge as we pave the way for its success. Perhaps, as we get into in-depth research for this project, we will dig essential strategies on how to do it in road to success…(rvrr)



Introduction


PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE AIDS PROJECT MANAGERS IN MONITORING THE EXPENDITURE OF THE RESOURCES AND THE PROGRESS OF PROJECTS



Project Management as we know it today has evolved in order to plan, coordinate and control the complex and diverse activities of modern industrial, commercial and management change project, so that it will there assign projects a lot more presentable and convincing to the people who will benefit their projects especially the company heads like the vice president or the executive officer, stakeholders etc. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to a broad range of activities in order to successfully meet predetermined project requirements.


All projects share common characteristics, the projection of ideas and activities into new endeavors. The ever-present element of risk and uncertainty means that the events and tasks leading to completion can never be foretold wit absolute accuracy. It means that every project making you have to be precise in planning your project, you have to determine the quality and time if you want to make your project right but of course you have to take the risk because project management is a trial and error basis. For some very complex in advanced projects even possibility of successful completion might be in serious doubt.


Like any other organizational effort, systems development projects must be managed. When management decides to develop a system, it places the responsibility for the effort with a senior executive, often a vice president. The executive nominates a project manager (program manager), who is responsible for the timely execution of the project manager, who is responsible for the timely execution of the project within the budget’s limits.


The project manager must first ensure that the necessary resources are available personnel, funds, and equipment. To do so, he or she selects qualified professionals from the IS department, and sequesters computers and software for the development effort. The project manager then outlines a project plan detailing primary secondary milestones, the personnel dedicated to the different activities, the amount of person – time each activity will consume, and the calendar time by which the should be completed in time of presentation. If software tools and hardware must be purchased, this is incorporated into the plan.


Primary Objectives of Project management:

Specification, performance and quality

The end result of any project must be fit for the purpose for which it was intended. The project owner and all other principal stakeholders must be expecting with great results of the finished project. If you want to make your project presentable and perfect you must consider its specification, performance and the important component the quality.

Budget

The project must be completed without exceeding the authorized expenditure. You must buy first the important parts needed for the project details and designs may however come last. Failure to complete work within the authorized budget will reduce profits and the return on the capital invested, with risk of a more serious financial outcome in extreme cases.

Time to completion

Actual progress has to match or beat planned progress. All significant stages of the project must take place no later than their specified dates, to result in the total completion on or before the planned finish date. If you want to submit before the deadline, you must therefore make and advance study or you all ready gather some information not before it was presented to you.



Management information Systems(Second Edition) Author: Effy Oz
Project Management Eighth Edition Author: Dennis Lock Gower