Final Project Review

Evaluation the Effectiveness of Tools Used

I used many tools throughout my project to help me finish the project successfully but in this review, I will be talking about the tools used in planning the project. I used software called Microsoft Project to plan the entire project and the planning of the project as well. Aside this software I used a pen and a paper for my daily to-do list which helped me through the project. I am going to evaluate the software I used for the planning of my project and some features in this software.

The first and most useful tool in my opinion is the pen and pencil I sued at the very beginning of the project. I did a to-do list everyday on the task that I’m doing and how I get on with it, this to-do list was done using a pen and a pencil. The to-do list also helped identify what needed doing at what point in time daily and also helped store special instruction from short meeting with the clients of the project. The daily to-do list was constantly up dated so when a particular task is done it gets moved to the tasks which are done. 

The second and most important tool that I used was Microsoft project which was the planning tool for the entire project. Microsoft Project has some very useful tools within that help make project management easy. The first tool is the Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a chart in which a series of horizontal lines shows the amount of work done or production completed in certain periods of time in relation to the amount planned for those periods. It simply shows the amount of work done in a certain given time period and the person who did the work. The Gantt chart tool allowed quick and easy creation of multiple charts in order to outline the plans progression and schedule quickly and efficiently. This slowly made the tool far more effective and the electronic Gantt charts become a vital reference in the projects progression. However the tool did have some faults, the Chart quickly became time consuming to create although editing previous copies seemed a more time efficient replacement to creating new charts for progression.

The lack of experience of the use of this tool was also an issue because it was difficult understanding the use of the Gantt chart and its importance. The picture below shows an example of the Gantt chart.

Another useful tool that I used in my project is the CPA (Critical Path Analysis). The critical path is the longest sequence of activities in a project plan which must be completed on time for the project to complete on due date. An activity on the critical path cannot be started until its predecessor activity is complete; if it is delayed for a day, the entire project will be delayed for a day unless the activity following the delayed activity is completed a day earlier. When the critical path of the project is wrong, it simply means that the plan of the project is wrong.

The critical path helped me identify the critical tasks in my project plan and not to play around those tasks. It simply mean in order not to delay the project, every critical task should be treated with all importance so that the project will be done successfully. In my project, because of the nature and changes made, I have different versions of the critical path because every time the Gantt chart changes, the critical path also change. The picture below shows the critical path of my project at some point in the project because once all task are completed, there will be no critical path anymore.

For the project management methodology, I used agile because of the size of the project and the number of people involved. Though this was a project, it wasn’t a proper project with a budget and real clients and also I have no knowledge on the agile documentation. I used a blogger to update on my project to my clients and also use it as an agile documentation for my project. Every update and changes made to my Gantt chart and the project management was reported on my blog.  The Blog helped me a lot in communicating with my clients as well because I shared the blog link with my clients and they checked it daily and gave a feedback on what they think about the progress so far.

Conclusion

In future if I’m to do this same project again, I will just use pen and a paper to plan and manage my project. The reason for this is the use of these tools and software needs a bit of knowledge about them and without this knowledge it is difficult to use. I think just using a pen and paper will be very easy and very comfortable.