For this assignment, you will define the activities that need to be performed to achieve the project goals, structure them in the Work Breakdown Structure, and estimate their durations. 

In the first assignment, we got a basic idea about the project, its high-level goals, costs, expectations, impact on business, etc.

Considering that the project charter gets approved, we move from the Project Initiation (1/5) to the Project Planning (2/5) phase. In this phase, a great amount of work is dedicated towards planning the activities that must be performed to meet the project objectives. 

Activities in a project are typically defined by the project manager and project team. They are specific tasks or actions that must be accomplished to achieve the project's objectives. There is no "right way" to identify "the right" activities, although various techniques such as work breakdown structures (WBS), decomposition, expert judgment, and historical information can and are often used. 

Assignment, part one: identify 20-30 project activities.

Project activities are typically organized in a single hierarchical tree structure called "Work Breakdown Structure" (WBS). Please visit https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/work-breakdown-structure-basics-5919 for information about what the WBS is and how to think about its creation. You can also find plenty of other materials online (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akO2Lf1fHmM). 

Assignment, part two: create WBS

At this point, you should have the whole project effort decomposed into work packages and activities using WBS. 

It is easy to argue that the main reason for project management to exist is to estimate the project work to the best of PM’s abilities, and consequently make sure that the actual work proceeds according to this plan; if not, the plan must be changed. As Helmuth von Moltke once said: “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy”. 

In the third part of the assignment, I would like to ask you to think about how the estimation of work may be hard, or impossible even. Most of you have some work experience already. You surely planned for a significant number of things in your life. Think about how good your estimations of time (and costs) are/were. Try to consider how making realistic estimations grows to be more difficult when the complexity grows and specific experience is lacking, when you are dependable on third parties and when risks and changes happen all the time. Think about how it encourages project managers to fall into the malpractice of not estimating just because the plans don’t work out. How by doing so the PMs are voluntarily giving up the control of their projects and expose themselves to reactive “fire extinguishing” mode. 

In the links below, you can find two short articles about estimating work in an agile and predictive environment. They cover most of the typically used methods to estimate project work, namely:

• Analogous Estimating
• Parametric Estimating
• Three-Point Estimating (where “beta distribution” denotes the same technique as “PERT”)
• Expert Judgement
• Planning poker (Agile exclusive)
• Affinity grouping

https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/agile-project-estimation-techniques-6110

https://www.projectengineer.net/estimating-activity-durations/

Assignment, part 3: estimate activity durations

In the third part of this assignment, I would like to ask you to make estimations for all activities from your WBS. The technique you should use at least for some of the tasks is the three-point estimation technique (a.k.a. "PERT", you can find it online, for example here https://www.projectmanagement.com/wikis/368763/3-Points-Estimating). Please also demonstrate using another two techniques in estimation of some small number of the activities in a meaningful manner -- planning poker may be fun (https://www.productplan.com/glossary/planning-poker/); Expert Judgement and Analogous Estimating is something complex projects rely on quite often when it comes to estimating tasks. 

DEADLINE POSTPONED: Please submit your assignments to “odevzdávarna” in IS MU by Wednesday, 17.4.2024.