Project Budgeting - Assignment Example

Student’s Name Instructor’s Name Course Date Project Budgeting The project manager needs to take the initiative of ensuring the future operations of the plant is at stake. It starts with an entire plan that involves a strategic involvement of the project manager where budgeting for the whole project, making plans like scheduling for the project and organizing the resources within a given completion time of the project (Clark et al. 180). Since the whole project requires maintaining the standards of the West Australian storage facility it is necessary for the project manager to acquire the best schedule, appropriate resources and timely budget to meet the goals of the project such as ensuring that the environment is at best standard and also that the people around are safe. From the beginning, the project manager according to the state of the Western Australian site certain goals need to be particularly met. For instance, due to the bad state that the petroleum storage tanks are at including their complex and outdated design it becomes a major area of concern for the project manager. As Larson et al. (212) claim other issues such as assessing the safety of the surrounding environment and people’s health becomes the area to look into whenever the project manager involves himself in the planning. This would keep the company safer from paying all the fines that might be due as the environmental fines because of the petroleum leakages from the storage areas. Project budget becomes an important tool when it comes to making any project implementations. The project manager in this case of maintaining the West Australian facility the budget will only be a success when the personnel can use it as a guideline to achieve various project milestones. And below is the budget that a project manager would develop to ensure the values in the budget makes the whole project is accomplished. Estimate Budget Total Budget Actuals Totals Variance Contract Services Tank Cleaners Tank Painters $5000 $8000 $20000 $25000 $22000 $22000 $3000 Equipment Supplies 6Steel Patches 2m2 7Steel Patches 3m2 12 Steel anchors $12000 $13500 $15000 $55500 $60000 $77000 $77000 $17000 Transportation Expenses $2500 $2800 $3000 $3300 $3300 $300 Overhead or Indirect Costs Personnel Employee compensation $3000 $2500 $5700 $6000 $6200 $6200 $200 Grand Total $48500 $66000 $94000 $108500 $108500 $20500 Although a project budget should be focused on the specific numbers and accurate valuation of the resources needed to complete the entire project of WA storage facility, the main understanding of the budget remains that it is always an estimate. The employees or rather the personnel involved need salaries. These might be salaries and the wages of either part time or full-time services. The project consists of those personnel who were taken as a contract service personnel including cleaners and painters for maintaining the three tanks. Contract services therefore may include either the outsourced services or the other personnel included to work in the project management duties. On the other hand, equipment supplies might involve purchasing and delivery of the equipment used in WA storage facility. As a project manager, the estimated budget should go concurrently with actual value to keep the budget at par (Lewis 90). The expenses for acquiring the unleaded petroleum to purchasing the steel anchors required on top of the tanks for working on the heights and the steel patches becomes part of the budget. The budget also includes the transportation expenses for delivering every equipment and even the working personnel to the site. It becomes necessary for the project manager to ensure a smooth flow of both the administrative and field operations. Project Schedule Regardless of the methodology the project manager may apply in any project, the timely difference of every operation becomes of significance. It gives the project manager a clear budget frame which can be enable them acquire and allocate the resources in a timely manner. Also, it can assist the project manager specifically in the establishment of WA storage facility to define the scope and the goals of the whole project. For instance, completion of some phases of the project might involve various challenges, but necessities like cashflows must be regular (Herroelen et al. 20). It may include the money used for purchasing equipment, wages and salaries of the personnel, and other project expenses usually occur in regular calendar depending on the timeline. In addition, all the expenses and other project events should have a timeline and be driven as per the prepared schedule. However, completion for this particular project of the WA storage facility, the actual laid down schedule by the project manager will greatly vary upon different factors. For instance, the size and the degree of complexity, weather conditions, availability of the personnel and their experiences, and effective communication would really contribute to the success of project manager when drawing the schedule of the project. Scheduling of the project might require the project manager to perhaps change the complexity of timeliness whether from the original contract or the current contract as from the beginning of the project. In this project, the objective of the project manager is to ensure that maintenance and repair is completed. The outdate tanks need replacement with unleaded petroleum and even possibly changing the tanks with new ones. When the project manager has established the required task for the project, he begins now with scheduling the tasks according to phases as per the objectives which were set by the management. The need of defining the scope of the project assist in placing every task with their timeline so as to avoid extra budget that may hinder the previously organized budget. Possibly this might help the project manager to organize the employees who are under contract and those who are employed to work upon their designated tasks. The role of the project manager to identify the delicate nature of the oil leakages from the existing tanks need experienced professionals who are conversant with the time span they are likely to take. Completion of replacing the tanks in time saves a lot of time and cost that would be taken or spent. Whenever this is implemented by the project manager the duties are then taken with a given time span without going through various duty overlap and even time overlap required in allocating resources whatsoever. This factor becomes the most important part as it gives the correct scope of getting every operation successful and developing a limited time plan for completing the project. Below is the prepared schedule for the entire project. ID Task Name Duration Baseline Start Expected Start Finish 1 Filling the tanks Tank 1 Tank 2 Tank 3 4-6 Hours 8-10 Hours 18-20 Hours NA NA NA 0800hrs 1015hrs 16Aug.2017 1500hrs 2000hrs 17Aug.2017 2 Replacement of main supply valve 2 days NA 16Aug.2017 18Aug.2017 3 Cleaning the tanks 2 days NA 17Aug.2017 19Aug.2017 4 Repainting the tanks 4 days NA 17Aug.2017 21Aug.2017 5 Viewing the site 2 days NA 14Aug.2017 16Aug.2017 6 Delivering fuel 1day NA 18Aug.2017 19Aug.2017 7 Loading docks 3days NA 17Aug.2017 20Aug.2017 The appropriate scheduling technique for this project may be The Critical Path Method which establishes and assigns the commencement and the end dates based on various indicators on how tasks must be sequenced. Such constraints involved in this method determine the first date that an activity can start that is, later start of the project and to avoid the delays, the last possible date in the schedule should be considered in the processes involving the activities of the project. In addition, the early finish including the early dates proposed for competing each and every task or even the later completion of the tasks may assist the project managers to subsequently plan for the next task without affecting the next in a negative manner. This plan acts widely even in ensuring that the proposed activities are completed in time and there is no wastage of scheduling resources in the project. Project Resources The project resources play a greater role when project tasks are needed to be completed in certain period. The resources may include people, funds, facilities and the appropriate equipment. And inadequate or limited resources may create a lot of constraints when completing a project like this for WA storage facility. Therefore, this defines the task of the manager to properly schedule and ensuring there are enough resources in place (Kerzner 111). It then leads to the reason why critical path may be necessary for calculating the possibility of allocating the resources appropriately. Resource plan should be analyzed depending on the resources required to complete the project without putting too much concern on their availability. Assigning works or rather tasks are greatly based on the availability of the resources (Larson and Clifford 85). For instance, the availability of funds in the WA project makes the personnel figure out the pace of carrying out the task they are assigned at that moment. Every phase of the task requires enough funds to enable the employees execute their duties efficiently. There must be sufficient funds for paying the staff as from the management to those who are involve in the annual labor (Lewis 25). Majorly, for those involved in contract services like repainting and services require every material they might require for the process. According to Burke (13), project understanding helps the project manager to align their resources in a manner that the project techniques used should appropriately distribute and deliver the project tasks to every member involved in taking up each responsibility automatically. Throughout the lifecycle of the project of maintaining and repairing the tanks to avoid oil leakage, resource management and planning becomes of essence whereby the management of inventories remains critically important. Therefore, management and estimation of the resources gives the management a great confidence of ensuring much time is not wasted (Lewis 37). For example, estimating the materials needed for the whole project saves much time of acquiring and getting the repairs done in time. The allocation of the resources can be possibly completed by critical path project management. By focusing on the key tasks lots of time is preserved and much resources are not wasted. And through critical path, the interconnection of tasks with the resources makes the project to be completed faster (Kerzner 100). By focusing on assignment of tasks to utilize the available resources make up the critical path to remain steady. The project manager maximizes the resources by ensuring that there are chances of completing the project on a particular time span. The resource management therefore remains an important element of project management. Planning for the resources is critical for ensuring that the whole project is conducted as per the scope through determining every phase of the project. Therefore, the team concerned with managing the resources contributes in developing and managing the project and also including the team in the project as well. Managing the resources apart from ensuring better allocation of funds and acquiring the experienced personnel in this case of WA project, there are other roles and assignments which would be of essence throughout implementing the project (Lewis 30). Basically, with certain methods or rather techniques other than the critical path method, the project manager in this project of WA, can easily allocate the resources as per the budget, schedule and keeping proper records of the funds used. Inconclusion, initiating a whole project and establishing its success starts from the planning stage. All the phases require a proper scheduling and a proper allocation of the resources. As of budgeting, it goes in hand with resource allocation which also another important aspect of managing the project. Determining how goals would be achieved by the project manager involves placing the budget appropriately with the resources through identifying proper project management techniques which can engage in distributing the funds for completing every task in project management. Therefore, it starts with steps and phases of competing a whole project process. Works Cited Burke, Rory. "Project management: planning and control techniques." New Jersey, USA (2013). Clark, Ian, and Trevor Colling. "The management of human resources in project management-led organizations." Personnel Review 34.2 (2005): 178-191. Herroelen, Willy, and Roel Leus. "Project scheduling under uncertainty: Survey and research potentials." European journal of operational research 165.2 (2005): 289-306. Kerzner, Harold. Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Larson, Erik W., and Clifford Gray. Project Management: The Managerial Process with MS Project. McGraw-Hill, 2013. Lewis, James P. Project Planning, Scheduling & Control, 4E. McGraw-Hill Pub. Co., 2005. Read More