CHAPTER 5
,How to Plan a TPM Project
This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.
— Winston Churchill, English Prime Minister
The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait 'til that other is ready.
— Henry David Thoreau, American naturalist
Every moment spent planning saves three or four in execution.
— Crawford Greenwalt, President, DuPont
The hammer must be swung in cadence, when more than one is hammering the iron.
— Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher
CHAPTER LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you will be able to:
- Understand the importance of planning a project
- Understand the purpose of the Joint Project Planning Session (JPPS)
- Know how to plan a JPPS
- Know the contents of the project proposal
- Recognize the difference between activities and tasks
- Understand the importance of the completeness criteria to your ability to manage the work of the project
- Explain the approaches to building the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
- Generate a WBS from the RBS
- Use the WBS as a planning tool and reporting tool
- Understand top-down versus bottom-up processes for building the WBS
- Define a work package and its purposes
- Understand the difference between effort and duration
- Explain the relationship between resource loading and task duration
- List and explain the causes of variation in task duration
- Use any one of six task-duration estimation methods
- Understand the process of creating cost estimates at the task level
- Schedule people to project activities using a skill matrix
- Understand the process of determining resource requirements at the task level
- Construct a network representation of the project tasks
- Understand the four types of task dependencies and when they are used
- Recognize the types of constraints that create task sequences
- Compute the earliest start (ES), earliest finish (EF), latest start (LS), and latest finish (LF) times for every task in the network
- Understand lag variables and their uses
- Identify the critical path in the project
- Define free slack and total slack and know their significance
- Analyze the network for possible schedule compression
- Use advanced network dependency relationships for improving the project schedule
- Understand and apply management reserve
- Utilize various approaches to leveling resources
- Determine the appropriate use of substitute resources
How often have you heard it said that planning is a waste of time? No sooner is the plan completed than someone comes along to change it. These same naysayers would also argue that the plan, once completed, is disregarded and merely put on the shelf so the team can get down to doing some real work. As this chapter points out, these views are incorrect.