Project management is not a new management fad; it is a professional
practice that has reached wide acceptance in many industries from government to technology. Organizations that have adopted project management as a key competency have benefited from improved project outcomes to significant competitive advantage.
Unfortunately there is very little material on project management written exclusively for the development and humanitarian assistance sector. Most of the information available to development organizations focuses on the funding and monitoring and evaluation process; but there is little information about all the management competencies, methodologies and practices required to manage a project from beginning to end.
Development organizations are facing increasing demands to do more with less, from becoming catalysts of change in the communities they serve to deliver the project on time, under budget and in the quality not only expected but demanded by donors and beneficiaries. To face these challenges development and humanitarian assistance organizations are in urgent need of the tools, practices methodologies that a well established project management methodology can provide, one that has been quite successful in other industries. Donors are requiring better controls and more professional managerial competences in the staff responsible for managing projects, it will not be a surprise that in the near future this competence is not only required but demanded.
It is PM4DEV’s belief in the need for a new project management methodology that responds to the current challenges development challenges face today. Gone are the days when a technical competency on a development field was all that was needed to run a project. Today’s development projects are more complex and require the participation of more stakeholders, the coordination between different specialist from different fields, and the need to innovate different approaches to solve complex problems.
Many years of experience managing projects have convinced us of the need to increase the use of project management practices in development organizations; this document is one small step to help develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter from a new perspective.
Objective: The main objective of the second part of graduation project is to accumulate between the theoretical part and the practical part. This part will help in understanding the meaning of management and apply it in a real case that has been done, so we will try to minimize the project time with accepted cost and resource. We use NIS in our project, and calendar day. Then we have considered the following steps: 1- The order of accomplishing the activities: representing the sequence of the activities to build and finish the building as it represented in the (WBS). 2- Determine the relations and dependency between all the activities: * Some activities start when the dependence activities finished, it called (finish to start). * Some activities finish when the dependence activities started, it called (start to finish). * Some activities start when the dependence activities started, it called (start to start). * Some activities finish when the dependence activities finished, it called (finish to finish). Special Case: Some activities start after a duration of starting another dependence activities (overlap partially with dependence activities duration). This case is considered to be (start to start) and the deference duration between the activities considered being the lag. All the previous data were collected and were inserted to primavera program and we have the results as shown in the appendix 1. The previous appendix represents the following data: 1- Project start on (25JUL2010). 2-Project End on (23 MAR 2011). 3- The duration to accomplish the project is: 242 calendar days contain 208 working days. 4- All activities with red color represent the critical path for the project; it is the main path for the project and represents the activities that follow each other. 5- All activities with green color represent the activities that performed parallel with the red activities and don’t affect the main path (critical path) directly. The total duration of the project as planed in this case study is 208 working days, "25 July 2010 – 23 march 2011". which is 242 calendar days . But the actual work in the project was finished in 310 calendar days. The large difference between the planed duration and the actual is due to many factors, such as: 1. At the beginning of excavation work they found that a rock layer below the clay one and they had to extend the time to excavate the rocks layers, but in fact they have to clean the region from the separated and loose stone so that the ground become solid and regular and filled the cracks by whether Albanian or cement mortar, concrete, cement, depending on the size cracks. 2. There is a variation order for the boundary wall and preparing the asphalt work for the external yard, also this variation order tack a period of time added to the total duration of the project.