Purchasing and Material Management

Time management is an important factor in project planning and execution, and project plan is an integral part of any modern business. Today there are various types of task scheduling instrumental, but Gantt chart is still one of the most popular among them. Gantt chart was developed by Henry Gantt as a method of project’s schedule visualization. Since 1910, these chart has become an integral component of planning; it allows to visualize the beginning the end of the project along with each element or task that needs to be done. Since many tasks are dependent on previous charts, it’s possible to see these dependencies and consider them why creating a long-term plan.

The project we are about to manage is a software-development process, which is coordinated by Agile principles. Agile is a flexible development methodology, where after each iteration the customer can observe the result and understand whether it satisfies it or not. Due to the lack of specific formulations of results, it is difficult to assess the labor costs and costs required for development in the beginning of the process. The project’s team consists of 11 people, who work on the same task division, consisting of Product manager, Product Marketing Manager, Project manager, two Android and iOS developers and QA-engineers.

All tasks of the team begin with project’s preparatory phase. The purpose of the phase is to create a certain concept of the future system on the basis of the customer's proposals and, based on this concept, to assess the relevance and feasibility of the project. If the decision to attract an executor is taken by the customer on a competitive basis, then the preliminary stage is, in fact, the stage of preparation of the potential executor for the competition, including the formation of the necessary documentation. The project, the concept of which appears to be acceptable for implementation, goes to the stage of development of requirements. At this stage, the performer must form a list of all the explicit and hidden needs of the customer. It often turns out that the customer either does not determine his needs, or his needs conflict with each other, with the capabilities of the customer or with the capabilities of the performer. The objectives of the phase are to identify all hidden needs, resolve conflicts of requirements, formulate a holistic technical solution and analyze the feasibility of a prepared solution. Gantt charts provide the ability to effectively organize the working process. In order to create a task plan according to Gantt, firstly, it’s necessary to identify a complete list of all project tasks and the time required to perform each of them. Because of the relative complexity of this method, some managers are questioning its benefits for small businesses. One of the reasons for this is there is a need to focus on the most important tasks and then break them into groups and subtasks before execution in order to accurately evaluate your efficiency and set precise deadlines. This time of managing helps to establish a timeline and facilitate project planning.

Sometimes clarification of requirements leads to a revision of the concept of the project. If, after clarifying all the requirements, it is not possible to find an acceptable technical solution, the project has to be curtailed or delayed for a while in anticipation of more acceptable circumstances. Due to the fact that many processes often depend on each other, it is difficult to calculate how much time it takes for the task to be completed. The columns in the Gantt chart are used as an indicator of the time that must be devoted to the task, and thus it gets a more extensive and detailed picture of the project and its time frames. It’s important to consider holidays, days off and settle a few emergency days for each process, as the next division of subtasks could miss the deadlines if the previous parts would miss deadlines. However, both of the points and series represent the hierarchical collection that allows, for example, to submit a project as a set of related, hierarchical tasks. Many task divisions allow to display various data, such as holiday, business trip and sick leave on the same chart. There is a possibility of setting the links between different intervals of the charts, thus the end of one interval may be associated with the beginning of the following interval chart.

After completing the design of the architecture, it is necessary to revisit the main parameters of the project again and decide whether the executor is able to complete the project. It is useful at the stage of developing the architecture to refuse excessive and too cumbersome functions. Optimizing an architectural solution often helps to fit into acceptable project parameters; in other cases, a more radical reduction of the functionality of the system under development is required (White, 2015) . However, even stopping the project at this stage, if it occurs for good reasons, should be perceived as a victory: the continuation of works in this case can only lead to even greater losses. For this stage of project’s development, the Gantt chart provides an ability to support of the special software for project planning to facilitate complex calculations and dependencies, and run the what-if analysis. Moreover, in one table every team is able to see the whole project, broken into separate tasks. In addition, by means of a Gantt chart to allocate resources to tasks and calculate a budget; it also allows to simulate different situations. Scheduling projects using Gantt charts, it’s easy to create groups of project participants at the same chart and set tasks for different groups, controlling all at once (Siciliano, 2009) . The manager of the process can quickly update the information so that each participant is aware of the changes.

Gantt chart is visually optimized; it provides the excellent opportunity to monitor all parts of the project linearly, which allows the user to clearly determine what should be done next. The chart has highly customizable appearance. With various fonts, colors, display time intervals for each value displayed in the chart, it’s easy to specify an explanatory inscription.This planning method also allows to determine the milestones of the project stage and to identify the key tasks if you plan long-term projects, which improves clarification of requirements for the team. The diagram provides a flexible and interactive software adjust the zoom of the view (Kumar, 2005) . Regardless of the current size of the chart to display the set time interval (which can automatically be determined depending on the current data), there is a possibility to display a visible area of any given interval.

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