Discussion - Electronics Manufacturer

As a project manager for an electronics manufacturer, you are supposed to design a new, low-cost MP3 player in three months’ time working with a team of three technicians. Because outcome, schedule, and resources are all interrelated, what are some options you might consider if you suddenly lose two of your technicians? (p. 24 Project Management Textbook)

Week 1 Discussion

There are three main characteristics in any project; the scope, time and cost – These three features are often depends on to each other; increased scope typically results in increased time and increased cost, a tight time constraint could mean increased costs and reduced scope, and a tight budget could mean increased time and reduced scope. However, any alteration to these features affects the project quality as well as the delivery (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, 2008).

Assuming a project suddenly lost resources, for instance two technicians – The first option is to request for more time from the core management team. Although, this option is not the best because it puts adverse impact on the project manager and any effective project is not suppose to be resource deficient. Another option is to outsource, this would delegate the work to be done by these lost technicians to another persons (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, & Sutton, 2008). This option is possible to do easily and it’s a suitable solution, but it’s going to increase the cost of the project due to hiring and training new recourses to do the work, and the scope, cost, and time to implement the project would defiantly be impacted.

Also, scheduling the available resource over a period of time to cover the work of the two lost technicians is another option – But the option would increase the project timelines due to the fact that such project suppose to be completed in sequential manner, and more time would now be needed to complete every stages of the project (Santos, Bermejo, Oliveria, Tonelli, & Seidel, 2013). Finally, the project manager can also reduce the scope of the project, as this would be another option for him/her – Although, this is not also an easy  option because once a project is finalized, it is not suppose to be altered. So, by changing the scope of the project would have adverse impact on the quality of the project and the team motivations at the same time, and thus, leads to reducing the cost of the project.