Reference no: EM133011876

Part A:

Lab Review Questions: Budgeting Projects

1. Why are accurate estimates critical to effective project management?
2. How does the culture of an organisation influence the quality of estimates?
3. Why is it important for project managers to understand the fixed and variable costs of a project?
4. What are the differences between bottom-up and top-down estimating approaches? Under what conditions would you prefer one over the other?
5. What are the major types of costs? Which costs are controllable by the project manager?

Part B:

Learning outcomes from Lab 9

• Baselining a Project Plan
Baselining a project plan is essential to facilitate accurate tracking of project progress. Project setting a baseline is typically the final act of planning. It should only be done once key stakeholders approve the project plan for implementation, thereby signifying the transition of the project from planning to execution.
• Entering the status date

Open lab8.mpp file and save it to a file called lab9.mpp file. You now have a copy of your work to use to develop lab9.mpp. You will use this lab9.mpp file as the starting point for this week's practical.
Saving the baseline to allow actual progress to be compared with planned progress

• One of the reasons for developing your project schedule is to allow you to compare actual progress with planned progress. You can accomplish this by saving a baseline as a snapshot of your original schedule before your project gets rolling and then recording actual progress as the project progresses.
• This practical is to demonstrate how to save the baseline and set the status date.
Saving the baseline

Now that we have identified tasks, predecessor relationships, added durations, and assigned resources, we are ready to save our plan as a baseline plan. This will allow us to compare actual progress with planned progress when the project is underway.

• To save the baseline plan, return to the Gantt chart view then click on the Project tab and select "set baseline" from the "Set Baseline" drop-down list in the Schedule group.
• Select "set baseline". As this is the original baseline it should just be called baseline.
• Click the "for the entire project" option followed by OK to complete saving the baseline.

Viewing the Tracking Gantt Chart
If you now view the tracking Gantt chart it will display both the current schedule (bars on top) with the baseline tasks bars below them.
To view the Tracking Gantt chart select the Tracking Gantt option from the drop down list you see when you click on "Gantt Chart" in the top left hand corner when you are viewing the task ribbon. (You may need select "entire project" from the zoom section of the View ribbon to see the whole chart clearly.)

Your Tracking Gantt chart should appear similar to the following extract:

Entering the status date in preparation for entering status information
• Now suppose that you are in the executing stage of the project. In that case you will want to update the schedule to accurately record the actual status of your project on a regular basis. You can do this in Microsoft Project and you can use various features to help you to analyse the status of your project.
• To begin, you need to collect progress data from your team up to the particular status date. You will be given some status information to experiment with shortly. In this practical exercise we are demonstrating some of the Microsoft Project features. However, we are not actually in the executing stage of the project so we are going to artificially select a status date. This could be in the future or past depending on how quickly you are progressing through the practicals. Ignore this anomaly for the purposes of this exercise.
• For this practical, you are to select the project status date to be the Friday of the 4th week into your project. (This assumes that you correctly started your project on a Monday as requested in practical 1. If that is not the case make the appropriate adjustments.)
• To set the status date select "Project Information" from the Project properties group on the Project ribbon. Enter the status date and click OK. (The screen shot below does not have the actual date that you need to select for your status date. The date will depend on when you started these practical exercises.)

• Question: Record your progress status date here.
• It is also helpful to view the status data as a "gridline" on the Gantt Chart (and Tracking Gantt Chart). To achieve this, click on the drop down arrow below the "Gridlines" icon in the "Format" area of the Format ribbon.
• Select gridlines from the options displayed.
• In the pop up window that appears, scroll down the "Line to change" list and click "Status Date". Make selections for the type and colour that will stand out clearly on your Gantt Chart. (For example, a solid line coloured purple.)

You should now see a line showing the status date on your Gantt Chart.

Setting Options Before Updating Task Status

• There are several settings/options related to updating tasks. Mostly the defaults are what we would want in most cases. However, there are some settings in the advanced category that need to be modified before we enter some status data for the project.
• To change the settings, go to File->Options and select "advanced" as shown below.

• Scroll down through the advanced options and modify the "calculation options for this project" as shown in the screenshot below:

The following information explains what we have modified.
"Move end of completed parts after the status date back to the status date" - this means any completed work will be moved moved back to before the status date i.e. the work is now recorded as having been completed in the past.
"And move start of remaining parts back to status date" - means any incomplete parts will start at the status date, i.e. if they were scheduled further in the future they can now start back at the status date.
"Move start of remaing parts before the status date forward to the status date" - meaning that as they have not been completed before the status date, they are now scheduled to be completed in the "future" (from the status date).
"And move end of completed parts forward to status date" - means that the completed and incompleted portions of the task are joined at the status date.

Attachment:- Budgeting Projects.rar