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Speed Up The Project Process When Necessary  Essay

¶ … speed up the project process when necessary? One of the most expensive strategies that large-scale enterprises rely on to speed up a project process when necessary is adding additional resources in the form of larger project tams and additional headcount. This strategy rarely works as there is a learning curve, an exponentially higher level of cooperation and collaboration needed across project teams, and greater levels of orchestration of new resources added (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Just addressing one of the dimensions of a project's constraints will not help to speed up a project with any degree of certainty of reliability. What is needed is a shift in two or more dimensions of a project's constraints. Crashing, or adding additional resources to a specific task, not project wide, helps to shorten the learning cycle and increase project focus (Brown, Hyer, 2010). This is in contract to en masse additions of staff across an entire project that often don't scale and deliver value over time.

A second tool for accelerating a project is fast tracking. This is accomplished when there are a series of sequentially related tasks that are scheduled to happen concurrently (Brown, Hyer, 2010). A third strategy is to delay some activities and reallocate resource expenditures while taking advantage of available float to balance existing project requirements will concentrating on the schedule reduction...

A fourth strategy is to reduce the scope of the project to the WBS level of a project, thereby creating more slack time across the entire project an alleviating any resource conflicts that are causing the project to slow down.
What is the "crashing" procedure? Use an example from your own project experience to help identify the steps.

The crashing procedure concentrates on adding resources to reduce the time required for selected project tasks (Brown, Hyer, 2010). One of the most common and cited in the book is when a project manager for a software project hires more programmers and attempts to short the time to complete a given task by a month (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Crashing is a challenging strategy in reality however as the skill set of the experts brought in to accelerate a project often doesn't match with the unique needs of a project. In smaller projects where the skill set of programming in a specific language is relatively rare, crashing has an immediate positive effect as the extra engineers also bring incrementally greater knowledge as well.

Crashing is most commonplace on projects that can scale quickly when additional expertise is added. This includes application software development, web application development and testing, cloud computing platform development, and many aspects of engineering-centric projects. Where crashing doesn't…

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Buffers are an integral part of the critical chain concept and can save a project from failing by providing a greater level of insight and control over specific project actions and tasks. The role of the resource buffer is to provide enough time for a task to be completed yet also build in feedback sessions on how a project is progressing within the buffered time (Brown, Hyer, 2010). As the text makes clear through examples, a project buffer is defined by the time between a project's anticipate end date and the due date as defined by the customer (Brown, Hyer, 2010), Project Buffers have been in existence for decades and are mentioned throughout much of the best studies of lean production and Six Sigma including Eli Goldratt's book on constraints (Brown, Hyer, 2010). Buffers are designed to streamline the entire project by having the slack time at the end of the project, not assigned to specific tasks. This way the entire project benefits.

Reference

Brown, K., & Hyer, N. (2010). Managing projects: A team-based approach ([International Ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.
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