Project Management

INTRODUCTION:

Before we tackle the problem of project management, we should first clarify the concept of what is a project.

The concept of a project is not new to most of us. In fact most people have some kind of idea of what constitutes a project.

 

THE CONCEPT OF A PROJECT

Objectives:

Students will:

 

Think about a project you have undertaken recently…

What key features can you identify?

 

DEFINITION OF A PROJECT

A project is an undertaking that has a beginning and an end, and is carried out to meet established goals within cost, schedule, and quality objectives. Project management…optimizes the resources necessary to successfully complete the project. These resources include the skills, talents, and cooperative effort of a team of people, facilities, tools, equipment, information systems, techniques and money ( Haynes, 1998,p3)

 

WHAT IS A SUCCESSFUL PROJECT?

How do you define a successful project?

 

3 BASIC PARAMETERS

Look back at the definitions . What are the three main parameters we are dealing with in commercial projects?

 

 

SUBTASKING

Thinking about your own project one of the most notable aspects of your approach would be that you did not go directly from the start to finish in one leap.

You would have (consciously or unconsciously) set yourself intermediate goals, tasks and strategies to achieve these intermediate goals before completing the main goal.

This is one of the basic principles of managing a project. You are essentially managing a set of smaller goals and subtasks. You devise and monitor strategies to achieve these smaller goals – quite often these goals and strategies need to be modified to change in response to situations which arise.

This prinicple is used not just by project managers, but usually by all members of the project team at varying levels.

It is not a new prinicple, you do this on an everyday basis to manage your life.

The idea of breaking down a large task to a smaller one is often referred to as a WORK BREAK DOWN STRUCTURE.

 

Quality, Cost and Time parameters in multimedia projects.

While a general understanding of projects and project management provides a good basis for project management in multimedia.

There are however,some issues specific to multimedia projects that need to be addressed.

We need to be aware, when using traditional project management methods in multimedia that these methods were derived from engineering style projects.

Engineering style projects, in many ways work in a simpler fashion than the multimedia project. The environment in which multimedia projects occur is prone to many changes despite the best of planning.

For example,

say you are developing a website for a business. You have begun the project and general budget, timelines, and structure have been agreed on. Suddenly news of a new product offered by the small company is leaked, and to avoid the constant calls to their office about the product they decide to address this issue on the website. They stipulate that the new information has to be available on Monday in three days time. Being a Thursday you have only one day to source the material and suddenly this must become a priority over all the other tasks. In an engineering scenario, a priority list and course of action tends to remain fairly stable, whereas this is not the case with the multimedia environment.

 

What is Quality in Multimedia?

This is one of the first and most obvious limitations of traditional project management tools.

The key question here is

how is quality defined in multimedia?

 

In manufacturing environments it is an easy matter to define quality say for example, in terms of durability or performance of a particular product. In these circumstances the quality is a measurable quantity.

Conventional project management tools do not help to define the quality level that is agreed between client and producers – it refers more to a measurable attribute of product.

So while in multimedia, time, cost and quality are interrelated, so that a change in one will affect the others, there is no direct correlation.

Because of the relatively intangible nature of quality in multimedia projects, project managers often overlook the impact of time and cost on quality.

Furthermore, the concept of quality in media products is different for people from varying backgrounds.

Usually each project will have its own quality priorities according to its goals and target audience.

Linking time, cost and quality in multimedia

To complicate matters further, each multimedia project encompasses many levels of quality and variables within each of the production processes – video, audio, text, animation, content.

The impact of changes at any point, within any element, in the production process will have varying levels of impact, depending on how central the element is and how far into the production one is.

FIRST LAW OF MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION:

The statement "It's just a small change" warrants handling with extreme caution. Failure to do so can result in disastrous consequences.

 

 

 

Changes no matter how small,

 

In summary,

 
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