The Scheduling Dilemma BACKGROUND Sarah\'s project had now become more complex t

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The Scheduling Dilemma BACKGROUND Sarah's project had now become more complex than she had anticipated. Sarah's company had a philosophy that the project manager would be assigned during proposal preparation, assist in the preparation of the proposal, and take on the role of the project manager after contract award, assuming the company would be awarded the contract. Usually, contract go-ahead would take place within a week or two after contract award. That made project staffing relatively easy for most of the project managers. It also allowed the company to include in the proposal a detailed schedule based on resources that would be assigned upon contract award and go-ahead. During proposal preparation, the functional managers would anticipate who would be available for assignment to this project over the next few weeks. The functional managers could then estimate with reasonable accuracy the duration and effort required based on the grade level of the resources to be assigned. Since the go-ahead date was usually within two weeks of contract award and the contract award was usually within a week or so after proposal submittal, the schedule that appeared in the proposal was usually the same schedule for the actual project with very few changes. This entire process was based on the actual availability of resources rather tional managers assuming unlimited resources and using various estimating techniques. Although this approach worked well on most projects, Sarah's new project had a go-ahead date of three months after contract award. For the functional managers, this created a problem estimating the effort and duration. Estimating now had to be made based on the assumption of unlimited availability rather than the availability of limited resources. Functional managers were unsure as to who would be available three or four months from now, yet some type of schedule had to appear in the propo sal Sarah knew the risks. When the estimates were being prepared for her proposal, the functional managers assumed that the average worker in the department would be available and assigned to the project after go-ahead. The effort and duration estimates were then made based on the average employee. If, after go-ahead, above- average employees would be assigned to Sarah's project, she could possibly see the schedule accelerated but had to make sure that cost overruns did not happen because the fully loaded salary of the workers might be higher that what was estimated in the proposal. If below-average workers are assigned, a schedule slippage might occur, and Sarah would have to look at possible schedule compression techniques, hopefully without incurring added costs

Explanation / Answer

1. Normally in a contract agreement, the terms and conditions which involves all details regarding delivery, payment details and other conditions. In this process, some conditions are agreed upfront and for some conditions scenarios are defined which have to be agreed by both the parties. It is taken forward only if both parties agree to the terms and conditions put forward by both the parties. Therefore, the given situation is common but Sarah would have objected to the 3 months go ahead period and put forward her challenges at that point of time so that the client is also prepared for the same. This would have given her a better option to work out on resources and keep the client updated from time to time on the developments. Overall, the situation is common but I feel the way to handle this was not very proactive.

2. Yes, in order to prevent such situations for future projects, there can be policies which can be introduced giving better picture to the clients. This would make them decide on whom to give the contract and not suffer later. In a way it would prevent the organsiation's reputation to go down in front of the client and in some cases the clients would also appreciate the professionalism of the organsiation and award the project.

3. Yes it is possible to convince a client by giving them an estimate of the budget during competitive bidding but it is always necessary to ensure it works out in the budget that is mentioned. If the budget overshoots from the given estimated budget, there would be revolt by the customer and there is every chance that in future bidding the organsiation is blacklisted from doing so or they would not be preferred.

4. The schedule compression techniques to complete the contract within the committed schedule time was working overtime, outsourcing a part of the work to a third party and working paralelly with other projects. There were some techniques which she did not consider was to check with other project's work status and how much was the need of expert workers in those projects. She would have studied on other project's status and put forward a proposal to the management to move the expert workers from the other project to this project. This would have helped her overcme some part of the challenge where she would have atleast completed the contract a little earlier than committed time.

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