Q1: What is the infeasible project? How are infeasible projects handled?

Ans. A project is infeasible due to following reasons:

• The scope of the project is not properly defined.
• Time limit for the project is not specified.
• Required resources for the project are not provided.
• The understanding of the project is not clear.
• Strategical alignment of the project is not there.

An example of a common scenario that can occur between a Project Owner and Project Manager:

• A final date of the project is s specified, but the scope of the project is not clearly defined.

To manage an infeasible project, we need to revisit the project scoping statement and the 3 fundamental elements of a project’s scope:

• Understand the project objective clearly.
• Get a clarity about the output of the project.
• Enlist  the target output.

Once the scoping statement has been completed, there are four questions to answers:

1. How much funds are to invest and on what?

2. Who should take over the work, and what should be the load for each person?

3. What work is included in the scope? i.e. what work is required to produce the agreed Outputs.

4. How long will the project take?

Q2: Discuss the possible rational for including or not including the cost in an organization’s productivity measures.

Ans.: Cost-benefit analysis is used mainly to assess the financial status of  large private and public sector projects. Private sector organizations  use many project appraisal techniques, such as rate of return etc. Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) estimates and totals  the equivalent financial value of the profits and costs to the projects to know whether they are worthwhile to develop. In order to finalise the feasibility of a project all aspects of the project, positive and negative, must be expressed in terms of a common unit; i.e., there must be a “bottom line.” The most convenient common unit is money. This means that all profits and costs of a project should be measured in financial terms. A program may provide benefits which are not directly expressed in financial terms but there is some amount of money the company would consider just as good as the project’s benefits. For example, a project may provide a free monthly visit to a doctor for a senior citizen. The value of that benefit to a senior citizen is the minimum amount of money that that recipient would take instead of the medical care. This could be less than the market value of the medical care provided. A cost benefit analysis finds, quantifies, and adds all the positive factors. Then it identifies, quantifies, and subtracts all the negatives. The difference between the two indicates whether the planned action is advisable. The real trick to doing a cost benefit analysis well is making sure you include all the costs and all the benefits and properly quantify them.

Q3: Which guidelines are taken into consideration for the successful development and management of the project?

Ans.: The guidelines taken into consideration are:

• Greater interactions of the  manager.
• Greater response from users.
• More power and decisions making authority.
• Greater money control and Liquidity.
• Greater Control over man power.
• Clearly specified requirements and scope.
• Using business strategies in IT projects.
• Clarity of project management on top management level, project boards and clients.
• Greater realism in setting targets.
• Appointment of a supportive project/programme office.
• Executive Support
• User Involvement
• Experienced project manager
• Clear business objectives
• Minimised scope
• Standard software infrastructure
• Firm basic requirements
• Formal methodology
• Reliable estimates

Q4: List out Five common errors that occur in requirement analysis. Explain in brief.

Ans.: The five common errors that occur in requirement analysis are:

1. Customers don’t don’t have the clarity of the project they want

The common problem in the requirements analysis phase is that customers don’t have a clear picture of what they want, and it’s up to the development team to ask the right questions and perform the analysis necessary to understand the requirement of the client and write software requirements specification that can be used as the basis for both a project plan and an engineering architecture.

2. Change in requirement during the development of the project