Week 3 Discussion – Project Initiation
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Please respond to the following:
- One of the most important aspects of managing risk for a project is to accurately define the size of the project. Determine the criteria that must be considered to perform the project sizing. Create one additional factor with a rationale.
Be sure to respond to at least one of your classmates’ posts.
Yesterday Jul 18 at 7:11pm
The size of a project is a mixture of subjective and objective criteria. The subjective aspects of determining project size may relate to the size of the organization and its experience with projects. A project may be small for a large organization that performs a great many projects, but the same project may be large for a smaller organization that does not do many projects. A good example of that might be the development of parts storage system. A large company with many divisions that each has its own parts storage system may find it relatively easy and simple to develop a new system for a new branch. A new company that is just developing its first parts storage system may find such a project expensive with many elements of uncertainty.
There are many aspects of a project that are relatively objective. Such criteria include the strategic importance of the project to the organization, its commercial complexity, restrictions imposed by or dependence on external factors, the stability of the requirements, the technical complexity, regulatory considerations, its financial value, duration, resources, and post-project liabilities (Hillson, 1). Scoring these criteria leads to a relatively objective assessment of the size of the project.
Another criterion that may be added is the need to acquire new talent. If the organization already has all of the talent required to complete the project, the project is that much simpler. If the project requires talent that the organization does not already have, it has to hire new staff, hire outside organizations, or train its current staff, all of which make the project that much more complex.
- David Hillson. 2012. Practical Project Risk Management: The ATOM Methodology, Second edition. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
