ENGM91 Project Management and Control Assignment Sample
Module code and Title: ENGM91 Project Management and Control Assignment Sample
Introduction
Project management and control further refers to a process of gathering and analysing project data to keep the schedules and costs on track. Effective management in a project leads to ensuring scope management to help each part of a project run smoothly after completion. A specific environment in project management process allows working team to be more focused on their process and progress to track all different aspects of project successfully under control. Specific methods have been imposed in this regard to greatly manage project management. In this study, factors of project management and control of environment followed by significance, challenges and mitigation plans of challenges are also highlighted in this study.
Understanding concept of environment in project management
A project environment is all the internal and external forces which affect an overall project management with impacting schedule, team morale and budget that are better for risk management. According to Cruz Villazón et al. (2020), maintenance of an effective project environment, clear and achievable objectives such as meeting demands of scope, quality, time and cost are smoothly achieved. Due to these processes meeting expectations of all stakeholders can be efficiently maintained by project managers including end-users and clients.
For instance, sustainable project management contexts have potentials to increase organisational values, reducing risks, creating opportunities and reduction of costs by increasing profits. However, environmental and lifecycle drivers include aspects such as statutory, commercial, operational and non-operational. These are effective to improve project management and handle project environment with positively.
A project environment refers to both internal and external forces of companies that impact a project management structure. According to Yu et al. (2018), environment in a project leads to impact on schedule, budget and team morale, allocating resources and motivation to working teams successfully in a project management aspect. This is important to influence nature of projects involving needs and make sure effective delivery after successful completion.
As mentioned by Naseer et al. (2020), major factors in a project’s environmental aspects are “political”, “legal”, “cultural”, “technological resources”, “economic” and “physical infrastructure”. Their positions and efficiency ensure a good project environment leads to an impact outcome of a project after completion. A project environment in such a way builds a culture in a project to ensure a sustainable proceeding and completion of a project task.
An engineering project imposes greater human activities varying in scope and technologies performed by engineering professionals to integrate more engineering disciplines in organisational departments. As identified by Hayat et al. (2019), selection stage in a project mainly involves accessing project ideas and selecting adequate resources giving highest priority to the resource allocation. In selection stage of an engineering project, companies undergo the cost and potential value allocation to make sure an effective plan runs with a successful project management journey.
A sustainable project environment needs to ensure in selection stage of a project to place plans and resources significantly to ensure a smooth running of the project management journey. Suitable methodologies are chosen in this stage along with maintaining a suitable environment which ensures successful completion of a project under sustainable project management.
Theory of management and its impact on project environment
A project management process is divided into initiation, planning, execution, controlling and closing process. In initiation stage, project environment is decided to make an effective plan to ensure further management of project allocating effective methods. As mentioned by Baker (2020), planning a project ensures a strong connection between action of project management and desired outcome of company. In case of engineering projects, project management plans accordingly to reveal management views based on project management method insight that takes a plan to assure future plans.
Project environment with cost, time and resources have greatly managed in planning process that have successfully ensured sustainable outcome gaining in a project task. As stated by Thesing et al. (2021), execution is a process in which decisions and communication are assigned in a project journey to make a sure effective journey in a project work.
Additionally, stage of controlling has been allocated as a performance baseline associated with feedback generation process. Project managers provide their feedback based on process and progress of working teams and control future work initiation in project journey. Finally, the closing stage is used to engage the completion of all plans and measures taken in a project and leads to the delivery project at its final destination.
Theory of X and Y and its impact on project environment
“Theory X and Y” is an efficient approach that is used by managers to achieve a better human work motivation and therefore achieving better project management aspects. According to the assumptions of theory X, since employees do not want to work, a persuasion or punishment is required to improve employee motivations (Kusumah and Fikri, 2021). On the other hand, employees generally dislike more responsibilities, which is also an assumption of theory X followed by another hypothesis of resistance to change for employees.
An average employee has a requirement of proper guidance and formal direction which are essential to generate more revenue for companies in terms of project management. On the contrary, theory Y refers to providing employees with sound benefits that are why they can be more productive and improve revenue for companies (Tien, 2019).
Providing more benefits to employees such as an attractive remuneration and rewards as per their capabilities, more commitment and loyalty to organisations would be possible for employees. This would be advantageous to maximise profit with an advanced collaborative environment in operations management of complex project management domains.
Impact of project management methodology on its environment
An impact of a proper project management methodology refers to highlighting increasing speed and quality with more efficient and innovative measurements. In terms of project environment, a project management methodology is beneficial to improve business transparency and manageability of project activities (Kadıoğlua and Takcıc, 2022). Despite these advantages, a successful project management is further efficient to be able to bring more customer loyalty and satisfaction due to an extensive project environment.
Project management methodologies are a set of principles and processes that impose a plan, management and execution criteria for a project. A project includes a specific method that determines how project would be prioritised and would be completed. According to Baker (2020), agile project management is a method which is evolving in nature and has a collaborative way to organise all working teams together. In this method, planning and working management are highly adaptive and evolutionary; seeking effective delivery leads to process improvement of overall project management journey.
An engineering project needs to include dynamic technologies and tools as per dynamic requirements and expectations of customers and agile method offers project team to manage projects with collaboration and an adaptive approach. This method has employees’ innovation and adaptation of tools as per currency requirement of market leads to improved product and software development align with current needs of market.
Agile methodology greatly influences management of a project in its several stages making sure constant development ensures a great collaboration with stakeholders. Tavares et al. (2019) commented that project managers using agile methodology enable project management to increase creativity and innovativeness which leads to managing project success.
Engineering projects are based on creativity and innovativeness and in this context; agile methods bring commitment with innovative efforts which are necessary to complete a project successfully. In engineering projects, the agile method has been identified as being more significant to influence greater innovation to ensure its successful absorption in the target market successfully.
Engineering projects have implemented agile to draw its potential benefits to manage project results successfully as per desired. According to Al-Saqqa et al. (2020), agile project management ensures superior quality of projects involving change depending on market realities. Thus, a project would be more effective in its development process by organising its teams successfully keeping on growing and learning for continuous team improvement.
Better control is another benefit of project management: make sure a great quality of transparency and feedback integration leads to driving effective quality-controlled features in projects. Hence, innovation and a greater success rate would be highly integrated into project productivity management to ensure a project runs smoothly increasing working and planning flexibilities based on the needs of a target market.
Factors of project management and control on project environment
A project management plan is a documented format which is advantageous to maintain project execution, monitoring and controlling of projects in order to maintain a proper environment of projects. As asserted by Irfan et al. (2021), a proper project management plan is successfully able to help to create a better scope, cost and schedule to effectively address project timeline with positive environments. Control and measurement plans further include an aspect of different project management plans such as “change management”, “process involvement” and “configuration management”.
Due to a successful definition and measurement a project management planning is successfully able to provide a starting point of a project with quality maintenance of environment (Larsson and Larsson, 2020). A more organised project management with selection of key players and agents of projects, are successively obtained by define and measure for a project management and control of project environment.
A factor for achieving both quality and successful project management plan is conduction of an analysis of project management steps and therefore being able to analyse risk factors associated with a project. As per the views of Herrera et al. (2020), types of project analysis include aspects such as “process analysis”, “Budgetary analysis”, “risk analysis”, “personal analysis”, and “client requirement analysis”.
Due to conduction of a proper and efficient project analysis, identification of project feasibility with quality maintenance of project control is obtained by a manager which leads to enhanced revenue and profitability. In this context, a proper analysis helps to design effective project budgets and therefore monitoring evaluation of projects is properly achieved due to project and quality analysis (Guo, 2019).
In other words, help to avoid risks are successively obtained by project management and control of project environments. As inferred from the study by Chadha et al. (2022), after making a successful conduction of analysis, a process improvement plan is successively developed related to current processes. Faulty and poor processes are effectively modified to a newer version using redesigning a negative process is done using an improvement process.
Improvement is further related to domains of change and then test changed tools and aspects to be able to evaluate its effectiveness and relevance in context of project management. As opined by Sieja et al. (2019), after conducting an improvement in project management, both monitoring and optimising the process of results for changed domains are assessed.
After managing these domains, a proper and significant project control is effectively achieved and thus leading to quality of service for gaining customer attention and revenue. Advantages of project control are related to providing information which allow project managers to make timely and informed decisions which helps to prevent project risks.
Significance of project management and its impact on project environment
Figure 7: Significance of Project Management (Source: As inspired by de Oliveira and Rabechini Jr, 2019)
Organisation of goals and works
Organisational goals are referred to by highlighting three of the most relevant goals such as long-term goals, agile goals and performance goals. Due to significant project management and quality control, organisational agility is achieved that results in faster product delivery and enhanced product quality (Wamba, 2022).
A proper maintenance of organisational goals and works, have abilities to be able to provide an acceleration of knowledge sharing and learning processes that improves project environment. In other words, a successful project management highlights to promote a more collaborative environment for business domains to improve organisational efficiency and operations management.
Improvement of business efficiency
A better project management plan has an advantage to be able to provide an improvement of business efficiency and therefore leading to improved profit. Reiff and Schlegel (2022) asserted that, a Successful and robust project management includes better communication with team members and therefore being reliable to make an agile project plan. Despite these activities, a better project management leads to obtaining an overall measurability and maintainability of tracking performances of individual employees.
Due to these instances, a better organisational environment is thoroughly achieved by project managers in working environments and therefore leading towards enhancement of profit overheads. As a result, a positive working environment with positive and healthy competitions among support staff, leads to a quality project environment.
Improve team effectiveness with more communication
Project management and quality control processes have significant advantages such as being able to provide more effective teams with successive communications throughout the project management. As inferred from the study by Safapour et al. (2019), in a project management practice, there is a huge requirement of communications with project partners such as project team and stakeholders.
In this context, 5 C’s of communication in project management refers to “correct”, “concise”, “coherent”, “clear purpose”, and “controlled”. A successive maintenance of these five domains has an ability to produce improved team effectiveness with more communication that would be able to produce more revenue and profits with a better project environment.
Challenges of project management for affecting project environment
Lack of clear goals and success criteria
Unclear goals and improper direction for project management practices are one of the most significant issues of project management which might be leading towards loss of profit and revenue. However, it is difficult to predict each and every outcome of a project but having clear goals are essential as far as possible to radically increase a chance of more revenue (Madani, 2019).
In this context, due to making an overuse of agile project management practices, sometimes managers face a lack of success criteria due to changing nature of customer demands. Therefore, these issues lead a project to failure and achieving a poor project environment.
Budgeting issues and inadequate skills of team members
Two of the most significant issues of project management related to budgets highlights overrunning contract expenditure and overrunning resources expenditure. Baghizadeh et al. (2020) asserted that due to improper allocation of financial resources, managers fail to complete a project timely and sometimes leading to project failure. Despite this issue, a lack of skills of employees is another challenge to deal with because of upgraded technologies and lack of experiences of previous workforces. These challenges are enough to overrun financial resources and poor productivity of throughputs in project management perspectives.
Lack of stakeholder engagement and scope creep issues
In real-time project management, agile project management is a popular choice in recent times because of its customer friendly nature and in this agile process, requirements can be changed anytime. As influenced by Ajmal et al. (2019), changing and increasing customer demands lead to an issue of scope creep that highlights adding an amount of work with increment of cost overheads. This issue majorly happens because of a lack of stakeholder engagement and therefore requirement of additional staff with extended project timelines are the issues of project management. As a result, a negative project environment is achieved that further reduces the quality of work.
Mitigation strategies to address challenges of project management
Using agile and waterfall hybrid model
An agile and waterfall hybrid model has a benefit of defining requirements of a project in the beginning rather than changing them in real-time more frequently. As inspired by Ismail and Dawoud (2022), agile and waterfall hybrid models are able to improve collaboration and maintaining compliance with standards is possible. Therefore using this hybrid model, a better project framework as well as timely delivery would be possible in real-time that would further be effective for project environment management.
Requesting additional funding and avoid scope creep traps
In order to mitigate issues of scope creep there would be a requirement of requesting additional funding to avoid loss of revenue and profits. As inferred from the study by Elkhatib et al. (2022), increment of both budget and timeframe in terms of scope creep, real-time project delivery would be easier. These would therefore be advantageous to avoid conflicts with maintenance of positive working culture and improvement of project environment with better internal and external factors.
Providing training to employees
During industry 4.0 there are advanced usages of “Artificial Intelligence (AI)”, “Machine Learning (ML)” and “Deep Learning (DL)” to improve an overall project management practice. As per the views of Bhavsar et al. (2019), employees do not have proper knowledge about the algorithms of AI, ML and DL in most of the project management practices.
These are resulting in obtaining an improper knowledge base about business and project reengineering tools in terms of project management with respect to employees. Due to this fact, providing quality training arranged by HR departments for employees would be effective to improve knowledge of employees and therefore improving project environment would be possible.
Conclusion
From above analysis, it can be summarised that project management is a greater concept in which environmental impact has been included to ensure effective planning and execution stage management. Agile methods in engineering projects are considered as a significant management methodology to include more innovation and flexibility among working teams.
Hence, it can be concluded that effective allocation and management of agile methods would engage a strong link with innovation and flexibility to ensure well integration with market needs. In order to summarise this study, it has been found that challenges of project management are effectively affecting the maintenance of a positive project environment.
Due to these problems, project related profits and revenues rapidly decreased and mitigation strategies of issues would be effective to regain lost profit. In this context, using the agile waterfall hybrid model would be relevant to address the issues of scope creep and providing training to employees for technical tools would be advantageous to improve profit.
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