Effective Communication, Cross-Cultural Management, And Multi Constraints Planning Are Essential In Essay.

The success of a project is dependent on performance and commitment of a project manager. If a project manager fails to give cent percent of dedication, then the project may fail to reach the objectives preliminarily set.  Even in the international market also the increasing demand for the quality project managers are increasing rapidly. In other words, for running multi sites and multinational project the requirement for such project managers is enhancing dramatically.

Communication is the best key to convey information and keep all the project team members updated with latest information. It is not mandatory that, all the project team members will belong to same location. There are options where, the team members can belong to different remote locations. In order to commit them all towards a single project objective or goal, there has to be effective communication matrix. Once the communication matrix will be developed the team members and project manager must maintain the communication style. in order to communicate effective with remote team members, various communication paradigm is required.

In order to conduct effective communication with remote team members, the team members should be prepared in such a way so that they can adapt all changes very quickly. The manager must ensure regular team check ins. The project manager should invest on collaborative software so that all the team members can communicate with each other very effectively. The manager must keep focused on visual communication so that during communication each can see others body language, gesture, facial expression as well. For managing great relation with the remote team members, the project manager should create online company culture, create concepts and various ideas visually. The manager should avoid using long test documentations and set clear expectations. The project manager should also setup effective communication guidelines and trust the staffs and co-workers. Periodic team meeting will assist the project manager to share all confidential information professionally.

Most of the international projects require team members from different locations. The cultural background, language everything is different for these people. Due to different culture and language, the stakeholders can face massive problems and that may lead the project towards conflicts.

The stakeholders from different location generally use different language and belongs to different cultural barrier. Due to cultural and language differences, conflicts may occur that among the stakeholders. It can also lead to measurable misunderstanding. For differences in countries and language their communication styles are also different.  In order to overcome this problem, the project manager should ensure a common language and workplace culture. It is responsibility of all the stakeholders to use the communications style and workplace culture. If common language is not used then, all the stakeholders from different global location would b=not be able to understand their opinion and feedbacks as well.  

Managing Multi-Culture Project Stakeholders

For managing such multicultural language and cultural barrier challenges, the project manager should develop effective strategies (Frimpong and Oluwoye 2018). These strategies will help the stakeholders to overcome language and cultural barriers. Cross cultural communication style is needed to be developed by the project manager. Around different time zone, the project should be planned. All potential stereotypes should be avoided and the stakeholders should be open to all cultures and their differences as well. For all the project team members, cross cultural training has to be developed by the project manager.

Before developing multi culture stakeholder’s management strategies, the project manager should keep focused on political as well as academic attention. The project manager should develop effective stakeholder engagement strategies. It is expected that, the developed strategies will be adopted by all the stakeholders.  The cross -cultural training and development program will help the stakeholders to become competitive within interculture ambiance. Such training will develop cultural competency much stronger and teams will become more effective as well. Cross cultural training will help to advance individual stakeholder’s career. Cross culture training will help to build stronger relationship with the cross-couture business partners successfully.

For instance, a mobile app development project is considered. The assigned project manager has been part of such similar projects previously. The project manager has appointed an audit manager, system developer, coder, application programmer, analyst and testers. The time estimated for the successful completion of the mobile app development project is 4 months. The budget estimated for this project is $60,000.

After completion of 2 months or half of the time, it is found that the project is only 40% completed., However $30,000 of budget is already expended. From the current scenario, it is determined that, the project is overrunning in terms of time and budget. The project manager and team can overcome this situation with advances planning and scheduling technique. 

The advanced project planning technique that can used to overcome this situation is critical path method.  Using this technique, the project manager can identify the activities that are to be performed to reach the objectives. Using this technique, the lag time between activities can be shortened. Crashing is the other technique that helps to reduce the project duration by spending additional money. However, in this case the project is already running behind cost. Therefore, additional budget cannot be included to manage and accomplish the project within the left time. Fast tracking is the best technique to be used to compress the overall project schedule. It will allow concurrent progress of activity increased of sequence-based progress. For this project, the resources for each activity are already allocated and scope is also determined, Therefore, the scope and resources nothing can be changed. Cost crashing technique can be used in this situation. crashing technique can be used when fast tracking has not saved adequate time within schedule. Therefore. For the scenario, the best techniques to be applied are schedule crashing and cost crashing.

Development of Scenarios

According to Hickel (2019), multi constraint planning application is defined as an approach that should be evaluated effectively to communicate all related aspect related to contract, physical resources as well as constraints. In current application of Building Information Modelling (BIM) for the electrical, mechanical. Plumbing projects it has been found that companies and project managers facing multiple technical and non-technical challenges. In order to overcome theses operational challenges, the multi scale BIM which is consists of many macro and micro schematic information scale is proposed. In industrial sectors, for project success the specific project constraints that are usually considered include scope, cost, time and quality. Apart from the resources are the other constraint considered by the project manager and team. Constraints are the limitation or boundaries that restricts project team and project manager to build a project successfully. Karoriya and Pandey (2018) stated that, in any project there are limitations or risks those are required to be addresses by the project manager and team to make sure project ultimate success. The preliminary constraints considered for any project are scope, time and cost. Not only the project manager but the team is also needed to be aware of the constraints and its role in project success. Three of these constraints are collectively known as triple constraint.  As per PMI, each constraint is connected to all the other constraints. For instance, it can be declared that, if the scope of a project change, then it will impact the time and cost both. On the other hand, if the project timeline is speed up then, the cost will relatively get reduced. however, it will reduce the project scope as well. The triple project constraints are elaborated on the below section-

Time constraints- Time constraint is referred to the project schedule. Once the project scope is developed, the project manager should prepare the timeline as well. Once the timeline is created it becomes responsibility of the project manager and team to complete the activities within the specific duration. Each project activity has to be completed within specific period. The project manager and team should to rollout the final deliver during the period.  

Cost constraints- Cost is the other aspect of project management to be considered to complete a project. The cost constraints set a boundary line for the project team to ensure that, the project will not exceed the estimated preliminary budget amount. A clear cost management plan allocates individual cost to each activity. The cost plan is developed by assigning budget to each resource (both human and physical). A clear cost management plan gives accountability, increases business efficiency, saves operation cost, relief stress and lower down the overall expense of the project.  

Multi Constraints Planning

Scope constraints- Scope is the most essential aspect of project management. The project scope outlines the entire project defining its goals, objectives, aims and primary deliverables. In other words, the project scope has to be clear to the project manager and all the team members (Netto et al. 2019). The project scope also defines the features and project functions along with the tasks. A clear scope document is also known as statement of work (SOW). Scope statement helps to provide a clear roadmap to the team members that to be followed to reach the objectives. The project scope should be shared to all the stakeholders. The project schedule and cost should also be developed based on the project scope document preliminarily developed. Before defining, validating and controlling the project the scope document should be created. A clear scope document guides the project team and direct them all towards the project objectives.

Quality constraint- Quality id one of the most important areas of project management that ensures, the project manager and team will meet the quality level expectations. A successful quality plan increases the business efficacy and reduces the degree of waste occurrence. Quality management plan controls the major business process more effectively and make the project better understood by the project team members. Quality delivery makes sure that, the customers are satisfied with the services and project requirement. Successful quality plan increases employee participation and improve the existing risk management plan. The regulations of successful working practice also get improved a lot with quality management program.

Value constraint improves simple type through defining limits on the values that can be successfully represented. It is sometimes useful to oblige the value that an element can take. It also makes sure that messages imitate to business rules. The time constraint can be managed accurately using planning, scheduling, proper monitoring and controlling. For managing project timelines, the different tools that can be used are MS project, GanttPro, TeamGantt etc. In order to manage scope constraint, the project manage should provide a clear scope documentation including all the requirements. The scope can be managed by communicating the scope frequently with all the team members. For managing and finalizing the project cost, the areas to be considered include historical data, resources, vendor biddings and parameters.

Gantt chart is the project management tool used to define the duration of each activity after analysing individual’s complexity. The bar chart shows the connection among the activities allocate duration to each. The Gantt chart for the project is presented ion the below section-

Figure 1: Gantt chart for the project

(Source: Created by author)

The Gantt chart presented above shows the activities, their start date, finish date, duration, dependencies among the activities 331 days.

WBS is the approach used in project management to reduce the project complexity and breakdown the large project into manageable easy activities. It helps to make the activities simpler. The WBS developed is a 4 level WBS. The starting activity of the project is project start and finish activity is project completion.

Figure 2: WBS for the project

(Source: Created by author)

The use of WBS as a project management tool is presented here-

• WBS helps to reduce the project complexity
• It breaks a complex project into simpler and easy manageable activities
• It improves the communication opportunities among the project team members
• It makes the resource allocation easy and accurate
• The performance of the team members and productivity of the team gets boost up

Identification of critical path is important because it helps the project manager to conduct comparison between actual time with the planned time. The project progress can be properly measures using this tool. Using this tool, the project manager and team can identify the longest time, a project activity can take. Whether the project team ahead of time or running on time is also determined using this tool. The critical path of the project is presented. The red bars are critical activities and the red arrow shows the critical path. As per the structure, the project will take 338 days for accomplishment and the finish date is Thu 15/02/24.

Figure 3: Critical path for the project

(Source: Created by author)

After using As Late As Possible method the critical path stricture will be changed. For the highlighted activities, ALAP method is applied but still no change is determined the in the total duration and dependencies. The changed project schedule version is presented in the below section-

Figure 4: Critical path for the project after applying ALAP method

(Source: Created by author)

The maximum unit required for each resource is 100%. A clear resource histogram is presented in the below section- 

Figure 5: Resource histogram for the project

(Source: Created by author)

Figure 6: Resource histogram for unskilled staffs

(Source: Created by author)

In this section, the unskilled resources are allocated and the resources are levelled not by automatic resource levelling by increasing the capacity unit of each by 200% from 100%.

The cost analysis report is presented in the below section-

WBS	Task Name	Duration	Resource Names	Cost
0	Teesside PLC project schedule	338 days		£118,480.00
Project start	Project start	0 days		£0.00
Activity A	Activity A	146 days		£65,840.00
A1	A1	10 days	Coder, Developer	£3,200.00
A2	A2	9 days	PM, Application Programmer	£2,880.00
A3	A3	23 days	Analyst	£3,680.00
A4	A4	21 days		£12,720.00
A4a	A4a	13 days	Analyst, Audit manager ,E1	£9,360.00
A4b	A4b	7 days	Application Programmer, Analyst, Audit manager	£3,360.00
A5	A5	28 days		£13,120.00
A5a	A5a	24 days	Audit manager ,Coder, Developer	£11,520.00
A5b	A5b	5 days	Audit manager ,Coder	£1,600.00
A6	A6	26 days		£12,480.00
A6a	A6a	15 days	Application Programmer,Developer,PM,SE3,SE4	£9,600.00
A6b	A6b	6 days	Audit manager ,Coder, Developer	£2,880.00
A7	A7	40 days		£17,760.00
A7a	A7a	20 days	Developer, Application Programmer, Analyst	£9,600.00
A7b	A7b	17 days	Audit manager ,Developer, PM	£8,160.00
Activity B	Activity B	186 days		£52,640.00
B1	B1	134 days		£9,920.00
B1a	B1a	17 days	Application Programmer	£2,720.00
B1b	B1b	11 days	Analyst,SE4,SE5	£3,520.00
B1c	B1c	23 days	Coder	£3,680.00
B2	B2	139 days		£9,280.00
B2a	B2a	28 days		£0.00
B2b	B2b	21 days	Audit manager ,Developer	£6,720.00
B2c	B2c	16 days	PM	£2,560.00
B3	B3	139 days		£20,480.00
B3a	B3a	12 days		£0.00
B3b	B3b	15 days	Application Programmer, Analyst, Developer, PM	£8,320.00
B3c	B3c	19 days	Audit manager ,Coder,Developer,SE3,SE4	£12,160.00
B4	B4	139 days		£12,960.00
B4a	B4a	37 days		£0.00
B4b	B4b	12 days	Analyst, Audit manager ,Coder	£5,760.00
B4c	B4c	15 days	Audit manager ,PM, Tester	£7,200.00
Project completion	Project completion	0 days		£0.00

Considering 5.4% discount rate a budget is prepared. The ROI, NPV and payback period are calculated in the below section-

Discount rate (Rate of Return)	5.40%
Start Date	01/11/2022
Project Completed at the	Year
	0	1	2	3	Total
Tools and resource cost					0
Discount factor	1.00	0.95	0.90	0.85
Discounted tools cost/Expenditures	$      118,480	$      120,000	$      150,000	$      165,000	553,480
Tools and resource Benefits/Revenues
Discount factor	1.00	0.95	0.90	0.85
Discounted tools and resource Benefits/Revenues	$      100,000	$      135,000	$      200,000	$      260,000	695,000
Discounted benefits - costs	$       (18,480)	$        15,000	$        50,000	$        95,000	141,520	NPV
Cumulative benefits - costs	$       (18,480)	$         (3,480)	$        46,520	$      141,520
Payback Period (Linear):  2.07 years			25 Nov 24

Figure 7: cost flow curve of the project

(Source: Created by author)

References

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Gunduz, M. and Almuajebh, M., 2019. Critical success factors for sustainable construction project management. Sustainability, 12(5), p.1990.

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Netto, J.T., de Oliveira, N.L.F., Freitas, A.P.A. and dos Santos, J.A.N., 2019. Critical factors and benefits in the use of earned value management in construction. Brazilian Journal of Operations and Production Management, 17(1), pp.1-10.

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