Which kind of feasibility deals with deadlines

Many feasibility study templates include these values:. Conducting a project feasibility analysis is difficult, complex, and time consuming. However, this activity is critical to project success because it results in a well-grounded decision whether to start a project or not.

In project management, there are several techniques for financial feasibility assessment like cost-benefit analysis and break-even analysis, but the 2 basic approaches are bottom-up and top-down.

Conducting a technical feasibility study aims to evaluate whether the new system being utilized for delivering the project will develop adequately and whether the performing organization has sufficient tech talent and competences to build a proposed system or not. The technical assessment covers information technology, software and security issues.

It helps answer the questions whether a proposed technology solution is needed for the project, how difficult it will be to build it, and whether the organization has enough IT expertise and knowledge using that technology. For example, when your project develops an IT system , the key tasks of your technical feasibility analysis template will be investigating and comparing technology providers and determining reliability and competitiveness of that system. Also, you want to identify the assumptions and constraints of the technology being utilized in the project and assess the risks and uncertainties of the proposed system.

Your study will explore the size and complexity of the system and will compare it with the similar systems. Analyzing operational feasibility is to gain an understanding of whether the proposed project will solve the business problem or not. The operational feasibility study explores how the project will fit into the current day-to-day operations of the performing organization. Besides, operational feasibility helps the project manager or the relevant department with the performing organization to find out whether the current work practices and procedures support the project development process and how changes in the project can affect the organization and its day-to-day operation.

A schedule feasibility template usually explores the duration of the project and answers the question whether the project is too long to be complete before it is successful.

Project schedule feasibility estimates how much time the team will need to deliver the project and whether all potential deadlines and timeframes can be met, as well as whether following these schedules will be sufficient for dealing with the needs of the organization.

Also, it is important to determine whether the schedules are mandatory or desirable. For example, in your IT project you schedule a preferable deadline for delivering a properly functioning software system. You understand that this deadline can be unmet because the project team needs more time to test the functionality and develop an error-free version.

A missed deadline is bad, but inadequate functionality is worse. A contractual feasibility study determines whether the proposed project complies with the legal and contractual requirements or not. If there is a new project that requires the individuals working on the current project to be available, you may need to crash the current project.

There cannot be an exhaustive list of reasons for the need to crash a project. There could be any number of project environmental aspects or an external factor that requires the project to be completed at a faster pace.

Projects frequently run into problems or might need to be reprioritized or sped up due to a range of reasons. One of the prominent examples we saw in this was with developing vaccines. As the COVID pandemic was spreading around the world, several companies and countries were working on projects to develop a vaccine.

A process that would normally take years was brought down to under a year by doing things differently. As the need to develop and deploy a vaccine became critical the funding needed was not an issue. Procedures involved were shortened or fast tracked to speed up the project. Fast tracking involves doing activities simultaneously and does not form a part of project crashing. Source Link:redd. In a normal situation each phase would start only after the completion of the previous phase.

Even though many of the bureaucratic processes and documentation were sped up, there were parts of the project that could not be sped up. Regardless of the money that goes into the project, the time required for testing and waiting to see effectiveness of the vaccine in the volunteers could not be sped up. This is the crash limit. Within a year there were many projects around the world that successfully came out with a viable vaccine with more in the pipeline. This shows how project crashing can work effectively without a compromise on the quality.

If crashing did not involve a significant cost, the timing for the activity in question would be optimized in the original project plan. There are quite a few things you should consider while crashing into an activity in your project. Critical Path A critical path is the chain of activities that span the length of a project. Reducing the timing of an activity in this critical path will bring down the total project completion time. Similarly, a delay in such an activity will cause a delay in the entire project.

Source Link: acqnotes. Crashing an activity that is not on the critical path will not impact the total time needed to complete the project. Cost and Benefit Most activities can be crashed to a certain extent. A comparison between the cost that is involved in crashing the activity and the benefit it provides can be used to arrive at a decision on which activities to crash.

Resource Availability If an activity does not require a hard-to-find skillset, it would be easy to find more people to work on it and hence easy to crash. Organizations may even have an availability of skilled professionals who can be used for a specific activity for a limited time. The ready availability of such a workforce can also be factored in while considering crashing a project.

Training Needs If an activity needs a specialized skillset, then it will be hard to crash it. Outsourcing a part of the activity or spending time training new personnel may be time-consuming and make the process more expensive. There will be countless factors affecting your project that you will be in a better position to assess.

A lot of these factors may need to be taken into account while crashing a project. Once you have a plan and a budget in place it is important to get it approved by the project sponsors and key stakeholders. Project Crashing Management StagesWhen the circumstances where a project crashing becomes evident, then you would need to do a crash analysis to identify what changes need to be made, which activities should be sped up, how they could be sped up, what would be the cost and more such details.

Source Link: cmswire. If the scope of the project has reduced, then there may not be a need to add more resources to speed up the project. How to use the workforce or what amount of work can be outsourced etc. Critical Path Each project will have a critical path identified at the beginning. This chain of activities is what needs to be crashed to speed up the project.

Crashing an activity outside the critical path does not help in reducing the project time. Identify Activities Not every activity can be crashed. There may be activities which need very specific skills that are not easily transferable. Hence adding resources to that might prove to be counterproductive. The list of activities that can be crashed and are part of the critical path should be the ones in focus.

Calculate Costs Crashing involves an increase in cost. This increase in cost will be different for each process.

Comparing these costs with each other will help you arrive at a reasonable cost at which some activities can be crashed to sufficiently advance the project completion date. Find Crash Limits Each activity will have a crash limit. This is the point beyond which an activity cannot be crashed. Understanding this information will give you an idea of how much the project can potentially be crashed. Choose the Economic Option Once you have an idea of how much each activity can be crashed and the cost associated with it, it becomes easy to identify how many activities to target and to what extent they need to be crashed to meet the objective at the most reasonable cost.

Get Approval from Sponsors Once you have identified the most reasonable or most viable crashing plan, then you can convince the key stakeholders of the project and get their approval to implement it. Why Project Crashing Matters When well-planned and executed, project crashing can achieve impressive feats. You should be able to alter your project to meet changing conditions and evolving requirements. With rapid technological changes and changing customer needs a medium- or long-term project that does not need to be altered would become a rarity.

The capability to alter projects according to changing requirements will give the organization a definite advantage over its competitors. Larger projects involve a lot of teams and processes working and depending on each other. Changing anything in such an environment can have a cascading effect on other aspects of the project.

This is what makes project crashing a key skill to have as a project manager. What Is a Project Communication Plan? By KnowledgeHut Every project has groups of people—stakeholders, development teams, managers and so on —working collaboratively towards a common objective. Bigger projects usually involve more people working together, often across geographies. As teams grow bigger, the challenge of keeping everyone aligned to the project goals also grows. There is a greater chance of miscommunication or the risk of teams being out of sync on a part of the project that affects their work.

Such challenges can derail a project and cause unnecessary complications that could be avoided with better communication. What can be done to prevent such mishaps from happening? Project managers over the years have identified this problem and one of the solutions that is being used to counter this problem is a Project Communication Plan.

So, what is a Project Communication Plan and how can it help? A Project Communication Plan is a document that identifies the communication needs that would arise during a project and aims to address those needs in an organized and timely manner. This is to be created along with the project plan so that the project moves forward smoothly at every stage.

The plan considers all the different stakeholders and all types of communication that are needed to establish and maintain healthy channels of communication. Can a document make much difference in improving communications? The document is only the first step in identifying communication needs and planning to stay on top of those needs. The success of the plan will depend on how well it is executed. We will examine how it works in detail.

Before that we need to understand what exactly are the things that can go wrong with miscommunication or lack of sufficient communication? Why Does Effective Communication Matter? Communication can create massive problems when it is not optimized. Too little communication hampers alignment where teams are not aware of what another team is working on and what they are expected to do.

Too much communication can also slow down work. Long meetings that are not focused or clear about their objective can keep individuals away from their work, delaying projects. When the marketing team receives an update, do they go ahead and inform the sales team, or do they assume that the sales team got the update as well? When one team spots an issue that affects another team, do they flag it or expect the other team to be working on it?

When there is a change in the plan who needs to know about it? What stakeholders, both internal and external, will need regular status updates? What can you expect to achieve with a communication plan? Importance of a Project Management Communication PlanA communication plan is about setting up a project that meets the communication requirements of a project. It sets up and coordinates: Purpose of each piece of communication.

Who are the stakeholders that need updates? What kind of meetings are needed? Who will attend meetings? How or where will the meetings happen? How often will these meetings be held? What reports need to be sent to whom? The mediums of communication to be followed both scheduled and unscheduled How can the communication plan be improved?

The last point deserves special mention. A communication plan evolves with the project. You can decide to change the frequency of meetings or reports depending on how the project is progressing. You could also add new meetings where you see the need or scrap ones that prove unnecessary. The plan provides details about the purpose of each communication and who the audience should be. The communication plan is created through a step-by-step process that considers the diverse elements of communication required for the project.

Let us see how this process would work if you were to make a Project Communication Plan for your upcoming project.

Define Purpose Before starting with any idea of a communication plan you should understand the scope of this plan and what is to be achieved with this exercise. What are the issues that can be addressed in this plan? Who are the people that need to be included and taken on board for the plan to work? For a plan to work the expectation of it should be known to the stakeholders.

That brings us to the question of who are the stakeholders? Identify stakeholders Stakeholders include everyone that is working on the project and everyone the project impacts.

All stakeholders need to be a part of the communication plan, but to what degree they are involved will depend on the role they play. Among these Economic Feasibility Study is most important part of the feasibility analysis and Legal Feasibility Study is less considered feasibility analysis. Attention reader! Skip to content. Change Language. Related Articles. Table of Contents. Save Article.

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