Project Management: Professional Development Assignment

This document provides solutions to a professional development assignment, addressing key concepts in project management. It explores effort estimation, factors affecting it, and strategies for improvement. The assignment also covers human factors impacting estimation, practical experiences to enhance estimation quality, and project network dependencies. Furthermore, it discusses the importance of business cases, the project manager's role, and project reporting, including various report types and their benefits. The assignment also touches upon aligning projects with organizational strategy, Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the workplace, and strategies for minimizing workplace conflict and stress, ensuring effective operations.

Running head: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Professional Development
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Question 1:
a) In the aspect of project management effort is considered as some defined amount of
work. It is also considered as the work unit that is needed for completing a specific
type of activity (Kerzner & Kerzner, 2017). Simply, the effort can be considered as
the amount of hours that the workers spend for completing a particular type of job.
The Elapsed Time is considered as available time between designating resource to a
task and task completion. Simply, the elapsed time can be considered as passage of
calendar days.
b) The main factors which reduces the staff availability are the sickness, low morale of
the employees and improper work environment. For this type of cases adjustments are
needed and here adjustments are needed regarding fixing the issues of low morale and
improper working environment. Sickness issue cannot be fixed in this case but the
sickness issue some reserved workforce can be there which will be helpful.
Question 2:
a) It has been assessed that mainly two human factors are able to affect estimation
process which are the personality and experience. In this aspect personality affects the
estimation process as depending on the personality of the human different estimation
outcome can be figured out (Suliman & Kadoda, 2017). For the experience factor it is
also the same. For a highly experienced person estimation is very much easy and also
an optimised solution is provided in this case where as for the inexperienced person
faces difficulty to predict the estimation.
b) The main strategies which can be implemented in this case are the giving proper
training so the experience of the peoples can be increased. In the case of personality

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related issue the personality of the must be in the favour of the organization so that
most efficient estimation can be done.
Question 3:
The three practical experience for the estimation which can improve quality of the
estimation are the metrics building up, documentation of the estimation and the qualifying
estimates. In this aspects building up a metrics is very much crucial as it helps to get a proper
estimation results. Documentation is very much helpful in this case as it is important to
document the work progress (Azzeh & Nassif, 2018). For a best estimation assumptions are
needed, this assumption is provided by qualifying estimation.
Question 4:
a) Within a project network dependency is considered as a link within the terminals
element of the project. As per the PMBOK there is no actual definition of the
dependency in the aspects of project management, but currently this is referring to a
logical type of relationship (Cadle & Yeates, 2004). Thus it satisfies the defined
dependency among two activities among the milestone.
b) It has been assessed that there are currently various of examples of a few dependency.
In this aspect the few examples of the dependency are the discretionary dependency,
internal dependency, external dependency and the mandatory dependency.
Question 5
a) Here it has been determined that the initiation phase is the most suitable one in this
case for development of the business case (Charles Jr, Schmidheiny & Watts, 2017).
The business case has been identified for the identification purpose of project

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objective. Due to these factor business case is prepared at the initiation phase of the
project.
b) In the current aspects of the project management there is a deep role between the
business case of a particular project and the project manager. Here it has been
assessed that the project manager can be related with the business case in terms of
reward structure. Currently, project managers are only rewarded if the project
completed successfully. Regard this reward need to be provided to the project
managers after completing certain steps of the project as per the requirement of
business case. Through this wider requirement of the organization can be fulfilled
easily.
Question 6:
a) Reporting in the projects are very much important for the successful completion of the
projects and for the information system projects this reporting becomes more
important. In this aspects the reporting is important as this helps the project managers
to clearly track the current progress of the project (Wong et al., 2017). With that it
also helps the project managers to discover other types of risks and challenges which
need to be mitigated properly.
b) Here in this aspects the five types of written reports are the status report of the project,
risk report of the project, executive report of the project, resource report of the project
and the stakeholder report of the project.
c) The main benefit provided by the project manager in this case are better cost
management, better visibility of the project, a well manner tracking of the project and
identification of the project risks in the earlier phase.

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Question 7:
For various of aspects which will help the project to become successful,
understanding strategy of the organizations are very much important for using their services.
Another main reason in this context is that project manager need to align the project with the
organization and for that understanding core business strategy is very much important (Cadle
& Yeates, 2004). Through this understanding the project manager will be able to boost team
morale and will be able establish a greater stakeholder support.
Question 8:
In this case from the Maslow’s model there are five level of need and each of the
levels need to be satisfied for the employees. Here for the psychological needs proper
working environment need to be provided to the employees. Belongings need can be satisfied
by making the employees a valuable part of the organization (Neubauer & Martskvishvili,
2018). Self-esteem needs can be achieved by praising the employees for their good work. For
the self-realization need there should be a proper growth of the employee’s carrier. Safety
needs can be satisfied by assuring them organizational environment is completely harmless
for them.
Question 9:
Minimising the workplace conflict and stress is very much important for an effective
operation and organizational manager should look into this matter. For reducing the stress
clear goal need to be set for the employees, flexible work environment need to be provided
and the managers need to encourage their employees. Reducing the conflict is also important.
For minimising the organizational conflict first of all organizational conflict guidelines need
to be prepared. Also, the mangers need to train themselves as a mediators. Gender biasness
also need to be removed (Danielsson et al., 2015) for minimization of the organizational

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conflict and any type of priorities need to be clarified earlier. With that reason of the priority
must be cleared and logical.

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References:
Azzeh, M., & Nassif, A. B. (2018). Project productivity evaluation in early software effort
estimation. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 30(12), e2110.
Cadle, J., & Yeates, D. (Eds.). (2004). Project management for information systems. Pearson
education.
Charles Jr, O. H., Schmidheiny, S., & Watts, P. (2017). Walking the talk: The business case
for sustainable development. Routledge.
Danielsson, C. B., Bodin, L., Wulff, C., & Theorell, T. (2015). The relation between office
type and workplace conflict: A gender and noise perspective. Journal of
Environmental Psychology, 42, 161-171.
Kerzner, H., & Kerzner, H. R. (2017). Project management: a systems approach to planning,
scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.
Neubauer, A. C., & Martskvishvili, K. (2018). Creativity and intelligence: A link to different
levels of human needs hierarchy?. Heliyon, 4(5), e00623.
Suliman, S. M. A., & Kadoda, G. (2017, November). Factors that influence software project
cost and schedule estimation. In 2017 Sudan Conference on Computer Science and
Information Technology (SCCSIT) (pp. 1-9). IEEE.
Wong, G., Westhorp, G., Greenhalgh, J., Manzano, A., Jagosh, J., & Greenhalgh, T. (2017).
Quality and reporting standards, resources, training materials and information for
realist evaluation: the RAMESES II project. Health Services and Delivery
Research, 5(28).