Project management Coursework Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 2

Project management - Coursework Example The case: S M Construction has been awarded a contract to build a new manufacturing plant just outside Cardiff. The activity on arrow table below gives data on the activities involved in the plant’s construction. The excellent timeline view, provided by Ms project, is one of the features that contributed to the usefulness of this software (Muir, 2004, 59). The feature allowed for organizing each execution, listed in the case, regardless of whether they were complicated or long projects. This made the coordination between the projects, both long and short, much easier. Further, the compatibility of the project to other office apps also contributed to the successful execution of the task assigned by SM construction. The compatibility allowed for a presentation in Microsoft word, through copy pasting for better understanding. Further the software made it easy to derive relationship between the presented activities, thereby presenting an activity node diagram worth appraising (Taylor & Dow, 2013, 45). From the above case, the use of MS project proved that the SM construction project manager can minimize cost from  £26000 to  £19000. This was obtained by extracting a critical path from network diagram, which showed the shortest route possible. The network diagram showed that the lowest cost will be along 1-2, 1-3, 2-5, 5-6. Mind manager is another software, apart form Microsoft project, which can be use to perform the exercise presented by SM constructions (Lowery, 2001, 7). Managing such project, as presented, is made easier by mind manager through its outstanding feature of graphically compiling the data. The software allows users to add relationship between given activities and sub activities within a given project. Intuitively, the effectiveness of mind managers lies in how easy it allows users to organize information and