Reflective Essay: Agile Project Management in Cottage Reconstruction

Desklib provides past papers and solved assignments. This essay reflects on a cottage renovation project.

Topic: -MNG00785 Project Management
REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Student ID: -
Student Name: -

Introduction: -
According to the scenario given the house or the beachside cottage was to be reconstructed
and renovated in order to provide the beachside cottage for vacation as well as for the rent
using Airbnb service. In order to start the process of renovation task a local contractor and
two of the apprentices having knowledge in the field where hired and give the responsibility
of the house to get the task done. The budget for the project was $20,000 permitted by the
bank as a loan. And it was estimated that it will take two consecutive years for recovering the
money from renting the house to repay the bank loan if the team worked 8 hours a day for
days per week. The project management is implemented in order to get the work done
efficiently

Project management: -
It is a method or practice that involve planning, initiation, closing teamwork for achieving
goals made specifically, controlling an execution in a particular time constraint. The main
task of the project management is to achieve goals which are decided and to achieve specific
criteria of success. It is usually described in the documentation of the project. It is developed
at the starting of the development process. The above process uses agile project management
methods (Demirkesen & Ozorhon, 2017).
There is 6principles of project management: -
1) Vision and mission: -
Vision: -
The vision of the project is to develop a rental property or vacation house from an old cottage
by renovation and under the budget.
Mission: -
The mission of the project is to utilize the project management tools to prepare the house of
high value.
2) Business objective: - the main objective of the project is to convert an old cottage that
has not been used for a long into a house and renting a place to generate a source of
income to pay for the loan taken to complete the project. Converting a cottage will
lead to utilization of house.
3) Engagement Standards: -the standard procedure for the construction of small scale are
followed Like process planning, stakeholder working.
4) Execution strategy and intervention: -The strategy used for the project management
uses the agile project management methodology which is considered as the most
recognizable project management technique or it is the most suitable technique used
for incremental and iterative projects.
5) Organizational alignment: -it is an engaged, happy workforce. For example, the
alignment between the contractor and the client is considered as healthy and cannot be
possible without communication and hard work.

6) Accountability and measurement: -It deals with the action or the working of
stakeholders that are involved in the project management. which in this case are, local
contractor, apprentice, etc.
The accountability model suggests the responsibilities of every individual involved in
the project such as the role of the constructor is to prepare planning, follow the project
management approach.
In the project of renovation of an old cottage, our work is to supervise the work done by
contractor team by working 80 hours over the vacation and gathering information of the
approaches to increase the efficiency of the project. There were certain project management
tools that were used in the project in order to minimize the workload and also the labors. One
of the management tools were task management which helps empowering the team to
manage the tasks associated with the project and the project management tool that provides
efficiency to the scheduling, budgeting, reporting, execution and project planning. It is the
most renowned project management application and it can easily complete a small project
and implement within the required time (Piotr, Michał & Łukasz , 2012).
Generally, the construction project requires the involvement of multiple parties or stakeholder
but in the project above we just had the local contractor and two apprentices which decreased
the work efficiency and increased the workload on the individual.
There were a few other problems faced during the project: -
1) Maintaining the consistency of the contract
2) Changes in document project
3) Payment delay
4) Organization of project
5) Delay in construction time
In order to solve the problems of the failure in the above project here are some solutions to
reduce the failure in the other projects of a similar kind. By using the appropriate project
management tool work can be reduced and it makes the processes easy to understand and

keeps the thing organized. The cash should be present all the time to avoid time wastage to
bring raw materials and other resources. The proper project management team should be
appointed to enhance work quality as fewer members involved in the project will lead to the
clashing of thoughts and results in work failure. Proper communication should be there
between all the parties involved in a project to work on mutual decisions and in an organized
manner. The workflow should be maintained more digitally to enhance the effectiveness.

Conclusion: -
In this project, we discussed the approaches used for the project management of the
construction of a house from a beach cottage as it requires renovation. The aim is to make is
more liveable so that it can be further used as a vacation house and the property for rent for
those who wanted to have their own house or cottage to live. The $20,000 was taken from the
bank as the load. The stakeholders of the project are a local contractor and two apprentices.
Here in this project, we used an agile approach as is the most recognizable management
methodologies for the given project.it uses the principle called agile manifesto. It is the
project where the agile theory is used agile manifesto (Brechner & Waletzky. 2015).

References: -
1) Demirkesen, Sevilay & Ozorhon, Beliz 2017, ‘Impact of integration management on
construction project management performance’, International Journal of Project
Management, vol. 35, no. 8, pp. 1639–1654,
2) Brechner, Eric. & Waletzky, James. 2015, Agile project management with Kanban ,
Microsoft Press, Redmond, Wash.
3) Piotr Cyplik, Michał Adamczak & Łukasz Hadaś 2012, ‘Critical chain project
management and drum-buffer-rope tools integration in construction industry - case
study’, LogForum, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 29–37,