PROJECT MANAGEMENT - TASK 2 Summary Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

PROJECT MANAGEMENT - TASK 2 Summary - Essay Example The roles of the team manager and those of the team tend to be different in each project, especially so in creative projects like this one. The current level of engagement with projects has fuelled concerns that Project Management (PM) is becoming an increasingly complex discipline. Lack of clarity is probably among the major causes why projects fail. This vagueness ultimately results in missed deadlines, confusion among team members and costs going way over the top. It was my job as team manager to confront and eliminate them. The problems were partly due to an improper understanding of what projects were. A project is a series of tasks executed as part of a temporary undertaking to help create a service or product, which is unique in nature. The endeavour is temporary owing to the fact that the team members will disperse and then be involved in other projects. The time bound nature of the project made it very critical that we had no cost overruns and I had to have an ongoing perspective on the planning and implementation. Any spillage of resources would have diluted the objective. This time around, I felt that the event we were involved with was vital in its outcome. The funds raised were to be directed for the construction of orphanages. Moreover, the project was our responsibility till the end. The connections to be made on the way were several in numbers making it necessary for us to be in control of the project from the beginning. Eventually these techniques, which I considered appropriate to the outcome, were accepted by a senior management team. The idea was to smoothly control the three elements of tasks, resources, and time. (Turner, 2000) The following sections are a critical look at the tools used: Value Tree or Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) In discussions with team members, I noticed that WBS as a monitoring tool was not taken seriously enough by those entrusted with project execution. However, I can confidently claim now that WBS aligned with Value Tree has contributed tremendously to our recent fundraiser music show staged for a charity. However, initially there were difficulties in perception and the following is a note on the progress to final adoption of this analytical process culminating in our huge success. (Stainton, 1999) The Problem Value Management was perceived by my team to be peripheral to the core activity. The technique is actually employed in the early stages of a project so that preparations lead to the proper

Oil Industry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Oil Industry - Essay Example The factors that lead to affect the demand for oil include the cyclical demand, the prices of the substitutes, changes in climate and the market speculation. When there is an increase in the prices of oil the demand remains constant. A very large change in the price of oil leads to a very minute impact on the demand and therefore the short-term demand curve is shown like this: The supply of the conventional oil is relatively inelastic. This is so because the actual total cost of pumping the marginal barrel of the oil is comparatively low, once all capital expenses of building and prospecting an oil rig has been established. The oilfield will always cost the same roughly to operate whether producing at full capacity or at 50 percent capacity but in most cases the producers try their best to produce at the maximum sustainable rate. The short-run supply of oil is affected by the profit motive, spare capacity, stocks available for the immediate supply especially from the oil refineries and the external shocks (Zucchetto, 2006, p.45). The result of the demand and supply trends is that the oil market is affected and operates at a point where the small changes either to the supply curve or to the demand curve usually causes very large changes in the clearing price. The high demand of oil matched against the inelastic oil short run supply drive the market prices higher as depicted by the diagram below. A rise in demand causes a decrease in oil stocks at the main global refineries and forces the prices higher. It acts as an indicator to suppliers to increase production. There are time lags amid a change in price and the extra supply coming on stream. The demand for the oil is price inelastic. The combination of an inelastic supply and demand helps to clarify some of the instability in world oil prices (The Economist Newspaper Ltd, 2004, pp.8378-8381). Adding new capacity is expensive and time-consuming. Over time, both the businesses and the individuals have their ways of cutting back the oil consumption due to the high prices; this promotes new investments in production and the discovery of new sources of the market. This gradually restores the supply-demand balance. Changes in the supply curve can be caused by some restrictions on the supply made by the sellers' cartels. An example is the oil shocks of 1973 where OPEC announced that it would not sell any more oil to the US and would limit the overall oil output. This in turn meant that for a given price level, the oil supplied would be less because the supply curve shifts upwards. The changes on the supply caused by natural factors like the Hurricane Katrina which totally knocked out the production of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. The supply curve is shifted to the left and therefore the prices rise. An increase in the market due to some emerging markets causes the demand curve t o move to the right such that for any level of price given, the more the oil is demanded. In the long run the demand and the supply of oil is remarkably elastic, there is no over supply or under supply it is only the price at which the market clears. A high oil price in the long run encourages the consumers