PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project Management

Table of Contents

Importance of the Stages/Phases3

Needs and Demand3

Conceptual and Development4

Planning Phase5

Manufacture and Assembly Phase6

Activity-on-the-Node (AON)6

Timing of Activities and Total Float Calculation7

Project Duration and the Critical Path7

AOA V AON9

Critical Path and Expected Duration of the Project9

Critical Path V non-Critical Path11

Concept of Crashing in Critical Path Method (CPM)12

References14

Project Management

As a project manager in a U.K. based company specialising in manufacture of wind turbine blades made from glass and carbon fibre reinforced polymer composites. As a part of company's policy to move from traditional product development and manufacture to sustainable product development manufacture, the company has decided to hybridise lighter reinforcing materials such as flax and hemp fibre with glass and carbon fibre to make eco-friendly hybridised turbine blades. This work is part of a project to design, development and the manufacture of a prototype of new type of blade. Simple construction processes are chosen due to the rotor blade's small size. The paper presents the manufacturing of a prototype blade for small wind turbines. The objective is to implement simple manufacturing processes suitable for fabricating small blades yet capable of extending to the construction of larger blades. An efficient blade structural layout is chosen from an existing study

Importance of the Stages/Phases

Needs and Demand

The demand for project professionals is staggering, with an average of 1.2 million projected new jobs needing to be filled each year for the next decade. This demand far exceeds supply - and has precipitated a global education crisis that, if uncorrected, will put £4.5 trillion of the global GDP at risk by 2016.

Conceptual and Development

The goal of the first stage of development was fairly limited in scope, compared with the goals of later stages of the project. The single deliverable consisted of the development of a simple prototype that would help the customer team illustrate to their end users the goals of the project. Due in part to everyone's excitement at being involved in a new project and in part to the limited scope of the deliverable, we were able to complete the fully functional deliverable early. The customer was very pleased with the results and developed considerable respect in our abilities, which contributed to our team developing a high-level of confidence. (Mergendoller and Michaelson 2009 102)

The next stage involved considerably more functionality. The requirements were not as clear, and the time that was allotted was not much longer than what we had available during the first stage of development (despite the much greater scope of the deliverables in this stage). Of course, with our recently acquired confidence, none of those issues was much cause for concern at the time. After a lot of work, late nights, and stress, we managed to complete development.

Next, we prepared for the meeting with the customer. Given our experience with the first stage of the project, we expected that the customer would be awed with our results and that, after offering considerable amounts of praise, they would return to their office completely satisfied with yet another successful ...