Management of Housing Projects

Running head: MANAGEMENT OF HOUSING PROJECTS
Management of Housing Projects
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

MANAGEMENT OF HOUSING PROJECTS
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Introduction:
Project managers today are under continuous pressure to monitor and track projects. The
pressure to monitoring the projects is further intensified when the project managers have to
ensure that the available resources are not over-exploited. They also have to manage the financial
and risk aspects of the projects. The managers in order to achieve these three objectives have to
implement innovative methods (Bilau, Witt and Lill 2015). The projects management in today’s
world have to ensure stakeholder intimation which adds to the monitoring pressure. The
challenge is intensified further when the project monitoring report has to be presented before an
international stakeholder audience which do not use English as their main language. The aim of
the paper would be visiting these challenges from the point of view of Kate Greenwood,
international project management, The ATA which is a small construction project management
company based in Australia.
Analysis:
Kate, international project management, The ATA in order to monitor the progress of the
East Timor Housing Project should implement several methods so as not to over-strain the
limited resources of the ATA which is a small scale housing company with operations in both
Australia and overseas. The first method which Kate would utilize to monitor the progress of the
project would be measuring the actual progress of the project against the predetermined project
plan. The project plan would show the project milestones which have to be achieved and the
timelines associated with each milestone (Grabovy and Orlov 2016). Drawing a comparison
between the actual project execution and the standard project execution plan would show the
progress levels achieved. For example, if the standard time set of installations of solar panels as
per the standard project plan is 2 months and the actual time taken is 4 months, this would show

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that the function (installation of solar panels) was not executed within the time. This would mean
that the execution of milestone was not carried out efficiently. The step can be justified on the
grounds that the monitoring the execution of the housing projects on the basis of the
predetermined project plan would not require investment of any additional resources. This is
because unlike Australia, East Timor is an extremely poor country and as a result lacks the
technological to support highly advanced project monitoring operations (Li et al, 2016).
The second method which Kate can implement to monitor the East Timor housing project
would be conducting a survey of the occupants. The ATA can survey the occupants of the
housing projects to gain information like the actual levels of utilities the latter is enjoying after
occupation. For example, the occupants would be asked whether they are actually being able the
use the USBs provided, whether they are being able to meet their energy requirements with the
30 meters of wires provided for wiring their properties and whether they are actually being able
to use the solar panels used. If the occupants give positive response, this would mean that
housing projects have been executed efficiently (Kwofie, Afram and Botchway 2016). The
method of conducting occupants’ survey would relieve the project managers from conducting
expensive project monitoring operations. Thus, the first advantage of the method lies in the fact
that it would be economic and would not require investment in expensive project management
facilities. The second advantage of the method would be that it would actually enable the
company to measure that level of customer satisfaction which would actually show the level of
efficiency of the project management. However, it can be pointed out that the customer
satisfaction cannot be considered as the levels of technical efficiency achieved in the project
management (Grabovy and Orlov 2016). The second disadvantage of using outcomes of using
customer surveys of measuring the efficiency of housing project execution in East Timor would