PenMan’s Four Basis Project Plan Elements:
1. Resources – People
- PenMan focuses first on reliable and qualified personnel. We are experienced managing our own resources, vendors, subcontractors and sometimes client resources in order to meet the goal on time and on budget. A successful Project Manager must effectively manage the resources assigned to the project. This includes the labor hours of the designers, the builders, the testers and the inspectors on the project team. It also includes managing any labor subcontracts. However, managing project resources frequently involves more than people management.
2. Time
- Time management is a critically important skill for any successful project manager. Good scheduling is likely to lead to projects delivered on time and on budget. PenMan utilizes the appropriate tools to plan a schedule to the smallest detail.
- Tasks
- PenMan considers the tasks, their duration, the people required and the appropriate order of events.
- A project plan designed in a serial fashion is unlikely to be acceptable from a time or cost perspective. Although planning a schedule with parallel activities can be complicated, it’s the world we live in.
- We utilize appropriate tools and software to get the job done.
- Duration, resources, dependencies
- Schedule
- Tasks, predecessors, successors
- Critical Path
- Flexibility
- When all tasks have been listed, resourced, and sequenced, you will see that some tasks have a little flexibility in their required start and finish date. This is called float. Other tasks have no flexibility, zero float. A line through all the tasks with zero float is called the critical path. All tasks on this path, and there can be multiple, parallel paths, must be completed on time if the project is to be completed on time. The Project Manager’s key time management task is to manage the critical path.
3. Money
- Regardless of how well you manage the schedule and the resources, there is one more critical element – managing the budget. Ultimately, PenMan must get the job done on time and on budget. In our world, there are only a few variables and the two dominant variables are labor cost and time. So, PenMan focuses most for budget concerns on hiring qualified people and accurate projections of time.
- Costs – Estimated, actual, variability
- Contingencies
- Weather, suppliers, design allowance
- Profit
- Cost, contingencies, remainder
- Each project task will have a cost, and most of our projects are based on labor and expenses. PenMan is always concerned about the hourly cost of highly skilled personnel. However, it should be noted that cost per hour should be compared to production per hour. For example, a person who is learning their skill “on the job” will produce less work in an hour, than a highly qualified person who hits the ground running.
- PenMan Project Mantra is “NO SURPRISES!”
4. Scope
- The project scope is the definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish and the budget (of time and money) that has been created to achieve these objectives. Changes to the scope require changes to resources, costs and time. Management of people, time and cost requires a clear understanding and documented scope of work.
- PenMan considers the tasks, their duration, the people required and the appropriate order of events.
- A project plan designed in a serial fashion is unlikely to be acceptable from a time or cost perspective. Although planning a schedule with parallel activities can be complicated, it’s the world we live in. We utilize appropriate tools and software to get the job done.
- When all tasks have been listed, resourced, and sequenced, you will see that some tasks have a little flexibility in their required start and finish date. This is called float. Other tasks have no flexibility, zero float. A line through all the tasks with zero float is called the critical path. All tasks on this path, and there can be multiple, parallel paths, must be completed on time if the project is to be completed on time. The Project Manager’s key time management task is to manage the critical path.
