Project Evaluation and Review
Project Review
Now that I have finished by OoooHandbags Project I am going
to review how I managed the whole project planning process. The good features
of this project planning was with my Gannt chart, my Gannt chart was clearly
set out with the events having a suitable timeframe with milestones in them.
These made it so I could easily stick to my chart throughout the whole of my
project and stay on track with all of the tasks that I needed to complete. The
plan was very straightforward to stick to as I allocated all the tasks a
reasonable time for completion and gave myself time to get all the work done.
However there were some less good features of my project planning was with my
critical path analysis, this was where that in my Gannt chart even though I had
put all of the tasks I needed to complete I had not done them in properly where
Project Manager could then create a critical path for me. There were some
unexpected events in this project that did affect the process, one of them
being where my client had emailed me asking to change the colour of the
background in my website a few days after I had emailed them, this meant that I
had to change the colour of the site and show them a new site with a completely
different background colour. One way at which I could have improved my project
management in the future is with my critical path analysis, this could have
helped my project progress along better where I would have been able to know all
of the critical tasks which I needed to complete first, this would have helped
where I could have completed the critical tasks first and then carry out the
smaller tasks afterwards and maybe even finish my project earlier.
Project Evaluation
Next I will be
talking about all of the different tools I have used throughout my project
planning and evaluate how well I have used them.
The first that I had use was on Microsoft Project Planner
and it was the Gannt chart I had created with all of the tasks I would be doing
throughout my project. The Gannt chart was a very good tool as it allowed for
me to write down all of the tasks I needed to complete in my project with their
details, i.e. how long the tasks would take, when it starts and finishes, if it
had any predecessors and what resources I would use in that task. This help
greatly as I was able to keep track all of the tasks and plan them properly so
that I have the right amount of time for each time and have wrote all of the
tasks I need to do in this project down. Also there was an indicator part for
the Gannt chart where I was able to mark down how much of the tasks I had done,
for example I could mark the percentage of the task that been complete, i.e. 0,
25, 50, 75, or 100 percent complete. However what was not so useful about this
Gannt chart was with the dates for all the tasks had sometimes got all mixed up
and could be confusing was confusing in some parts when trying to get the right
duration and dates for the tasks. This could have been better by keeping good
track of all the dates of the tasks, I could have kept a note of all the dates
and made sure they are correct and have the right times on them.
A second tool which I have used is the timeline which is
created from my Gannt chart, this timeline gives a visual representation of all
the tasks which I was doing throughout my project, with the length of the line
changing depending on how long a task is and it also gives the resources that
are used throughout the task next to it.
This tool was useful as it was able to show me using the timeline how
long each task is taking when compared to the others and also showed me how
long I am taking on all my individual tasks. Also with the help of the indent
task button from the Gannt chart a black line is created to show all of the
tasks that are included in a group. I could have used this tool better by
having my dates a little more spaced out, instead of having it small by hours I
could have broadened it to days to give a bigger perspective of the project.
A third tool I have
used is the milestone tool in Project Planner. This milestone tool allowed me
to create milestones for my project, this helped show the important events in
my project and show when I have reached a milestone I have just finished
something very important and can carry on with the rest of my project with
ease. This tool was useful as I was able to identify the important parts of my
project and put milestones in to help show my progress and to make events that
show I have reached an important milestone. However this tool was not useful
where the milestone was not an actual event and has a zero day duration so it
could make it difficult to identify the milestones along the plan, I could have
used this milestone better by including more milestones in my plan. 
This is the fifth and final tool that
I have used in my project, the screenshot above shows a network diagram that
project manager has created and can be used for my critical path analysis. This
tool was useful as I was able to identify all of the critical tasks for my
project, I was able to identify all of the tasks which were critical and needed
to be completed first before any of the other tasks could be done, I was able
to know what tasks needed to be completed before the project could go on and
the project would be at a standstill if they were not completed. However there were some not so good parts
about this tool, the first being that with some tasks they were not included in
the whole flow of the diagram and instead but below or to the side of it, this
made it difficult for identifying when to do these tasks and knowing if they
had any connection to other tasks. I could have used this tool better by
sticking and using it more when doing my project, as I only used it once or
twice it would have been more useful to use it more often to see how far I have
come in my project and what critical tasks there is left to do.
