Project Management Tools and Techniques

Question: Identify at least three ideas, tools, or techniques that you have learned from this course and plan to use as a project manager. What will be most helpful to you? Why? Answer: Project Management Tools Work Breakdown Structure WBS is a useful tool which helps to break the key tasks of a project into small activities to handle the project in a more logical way (Lin et al., 2014). It produces detailed lists of activities which are necessary to execute the project correctly helps to deliver better scheduling, resource planning and to cost for the project. Gantt Chart It is a horizontal bar chart where each activity of the project is scheduled as a block against fixed time; actual performance is recorded and then it is compared for successful completion of the project (Al-Amoudi et al., 2013). It is very useful to estimate fixed time, resources and budget required to get the best output from the project. PERT Chart It gives better time estimation by considering the uncertainty and risks while predicting the task durations of the project (Lin et al., 2014). It is considered as one of the best time management tools for better planning of the project. Best Project Management Tool Out of the three above mentioned tools, Gantt chart is taken into consideration as best project management tool. The potential advantages of Gantt chart are Gantt chart can be used to plan proper time scale It can be used to estimate required resources perfectly in a cost effective way Helps to coordinate and track specific activities for a project Systematic structure of tasks helps to identify the risks at the initial stage so that best possible solutions can be adapted to mitigate that from grass root level References Al-Amoudi, A., Al-Mazrua, H., Al-Moaiqel, H., AlOmar, N., Al-Koblan, S. (2013). An exploratory study of arabic language support in software project management tools.Int. J. Comput. Sci,10, 56-63. Lin, J., Yu, H., Shen, Z., Miao, C. (2014, September). Studying task allocation decisions of novice agile teams with data from agile project management tools. InProceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE international conference on Automated software engineering(pp. 689-694). ACM.