January 4, 2013 BUS 5668: Cases in Applied Project Management Assignment #1: Best Practices
From 1940 to present, Project Management has continuously advanced from line managers using a small set of processes that were considered nice to have to the formal assignment of one individual assigned as the Project Manager that utilized a formal methodology by which to manage the project. Often the term “best practices” is referenced within a defined methodology. Why must an organization capture best practices? What are the determining factors in base-lining a best practice? Can an organization have too many best practices? What are the impacts of establishing too many best practices that mandated by senior management for use on all projects?
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Although best practices is the ideal method to use when operating an organization, not using the best practices method as it is meant to be used is just as bad as not having a process in place to run the organization. Time and time again, many organizations lose site of what best practices really are because they set too many goals as best practices. As a result, the organization fails to improve and keep up with competitors due to losing sight because they have so many best practices they are trying to focus on. The idea behind the best
practices is to ensure the organization is operating on one accord throughout the organization. By implementing too many best practices may result in the disorganization within the organization. Everyone would not be on one accord which can lead to miscommunication and every department doing what they see fit. Having too many best practices is just as bad as not having any at all. By implementing too many best practices, the organization have a higher probability to failing due to no realistic opportunity of implementing all of the best practices. And the best practices implemented will not be fulfill 100% due to lack of resources because resources are spread thin due to the
Find the mean, median, SD & IQR for the data in (1) after it has been transformed
As not everyone will understand jargon such as “best practice” or acronyms such as “NEBOSH” these are best avoided.
Best practices are techniques or methods that lead to better results and improvements in things such as ethics teamwork motivation or other things that keep a business going smoothly. These practices utilize all the knowledge and technology advances that one has to conquer success in the given field. The term of “Best Practices” is used often times in healthcare education systems project management as well as government administration and several other organizations. These things make certain businesses become the best in class or the ideal for its category. Examples of best practices are but are not limited to things that deal with price, employee perks or how happy the employee is, motivation,
The best practice recommendations are not mandatory to be followed by all companies but are guidelines designed to produce an efficient outcome. If a company considers that a recommendation is inappropriate to this particular
Several adaptations to the traditional approaches like agile, interactive, phased, extreme, etc have been made but each will be expected to meet the requirements of the project objectives, timeline, resources, and deliveries of the stakeholders. Other industry standard certifications like ISO9000 and regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley have also influenced methodologies and processes used by several organisations (Kerzner, 2003). Generally, managing projects should involved five major process which include the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and then project closing. See Fig. 2 below.
One company that has been particularly successful in implementing best practices is Toyota. I would adopt that companies approach to implementing best practices by delegating responsibility down to the lowest level. For example, if anyone on the factory floor spots a deficiency, he or she has the authority to stop the assembly line so that the condition and its contributing factors may be examined, recorded, and analyzed. This same principle could be applied to the acquisition process. By empowering rank-and-file purchasers, contract specialists, contract administrators, and quality control personnel to approach management and provide input on
The idea has evolved from local knowledge, a study of examples of best practice and informal community discussions with people and undertake a surveys with local residents to establish the need for traditional restaurant in that location. Our findings suggest that an opportunity exists to provide local amenities and a restaurants in the area, and develop complementary
Organizations do not change, people do (Sullivan and Decker, 2009). A manager’s responsibility is to manage people. Change is difficult for most people and managing through the change process is not an easy task. Many theories on managing change exist, but they basically have four elements: assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation (Sullivan & Decker, 2009). A manager’s role is to examine each of these elements and apply them to the people that he or she leads.
First, we plan on making observations at University Medical Center (UMC) to gain insight into how the hospital functions on a regular basis and to better understand the atmosphere that the physical design of UMC offers both patients and employees. We will gather observations by touring the hospital premises before we conduct our interviews.
Less than six months after the process started, the best practice tag was awarded to Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton Beach, Fl. They were allowed to implement their procedures Air Force wide. In the end, Eglin saved the Air Force six million dollars with its best practice procedures. As the term best practice has become more popular, some organizations have begun using best practices to refer to what are in fact rules, causing creativity to hamper.
In Besner and Hobbs article (2013), “Contextualized project management practice: A cluster analysis of practices and best practices”, an analysis of project management best practices in terms of contextual archetypes and organizational maturity models. According to their research, the identified best practices for performing maturity are initial planning, maintaining databases, business case definition, bae line change management and team management (2013, p.28). In reviewing the contextual archetypes, the top trending toolsets appear to be databases and initial planning (p. 31). It is interesting to note that none of the practices were considered best practice in all five of the contexts
In a production working environment, the atmosphere can be energized by fast pace movement of production lines, equipment and people attempting to produce a quality product. The total goal of every company is to provide the best quality product that is safe and economical friendly. We live in a world where getting results and ensuring our customers are very satisfied with the end product is important. In this quest, obtaining a high standard in quality can become an issue for every major company that focuses on customer satisfaction. Within the past three months the focus on quality has been the center of attention for one company who faced major quality issues in one department. Finding solutions and eradicating those defects is now the goal in order to reach the epitome in quality for customer satisfaction.
There are several best practices I observed during this observation they are Leaderships expertise and Life Experience.
Abstract—Requirements elicitation is the first and most critical phase of Requirements Engineering (RE). To aid the elicitation process, many techniques have been proposed. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. This variety makes the selection of technique or combination of techniques for a specific project a difficult task. Mostly techniques are selected based on personal preferences rather than on attributes of project, technique, and stakeholders. In this paper, the researchers propose a three-step approach for elicitation techniques selection. In the first step, a literature review is conducted to identify the attributes affecting techniques selection and common elicitation techniques. The second step is to analyze these attributes using a multiple regression model to find the critical attributes. Finally, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) based model for selecting adequate elicitation techniques for a given project is proposed. The ANN model help reduce the human involvements in this process. It was implemented using Neural Network Fitting Tool in MATLAB. The network has accuracy of 81%. The ANN model was validated empirically by conducting a case study in a software company.
The study is used to observe that the universalist approach which has as its objectives for the identification of best practices so as to later diffuse them in the organisations and it depends on the management tool to formalised and diffuse them. While in the contingent approach there is more to reserve limited place to management tools, but the tools may considered as the technologies. The latter shows the approach to improve the existing coherence between their different characteristics. It is mostly used effective approach in the various organisations.