Introduction
Almost all organizations and firms find themselves in dire need to initiate a project to circumvent a particular predicament or to increase their revenues.
Quite often, projects are aimed at pursuing goals and aims of the organization in the most effective way. Project management is the practice of organizing several resources in a systematic manner with the aim of achieving predetermined goals. Mainly, managers are expected to provide guidance on the amount of human resources, money, and materials required to realize the desired results.
Regardless of the organization’s goals, the manager is required to come up with a clear blueprint to direct his actions effectively bearing in mind the risks and uncertainties, which would arise in the course of execution of the project. This report endeavors to highlight the essentials of initiating a fire and rescue project that would ensure reduction of sickness absence in an organization.
Background
Almost all organizations if not all find themselves facing challenges on how to reduce sickness absence among its employees. To this respect, managers with the aim of ensuring continued production need to ensure that all their work force is available and in good health to carry out their obligations.
Launching this project would ensure the organization have the best safety tools to foster good working environment as well as reducing sickness absence. In a broader perspective, the management will strive to cater for a safer humanly working condition, safety equipment and apparatus should be equipped to ensure workers are less vulnerable to accidents. Although this project is an expensive venture but its payoffs have proved to be rewarding.
Reduction of sickness absence has facilitated continuous revenue generation through the year. Finally, analysis of the revenue foregone by sick workers has by far surpassed capital cost of launching the fire prevention project.
Objectives
This report endeavors to address the following objectives.
- To ensure that the fire and rescue plan is installed in time
- To ensure competent and skilled personnel’s are for the project.
- To ensure that the project meets it predetermined goals.
Benefits
Several benefits are derived by the project such as ensuring that the firm has a continuous production. Since the capital for initiating the project is less than the forgone revenues due to sick leave, the organization will be in a better financial condition. In addition, since this project will be able serve organization both in the short run and in the end. Once the initial capital is provided, the other stages would automatically fall in their rightful place.
Cost
This entails capturing the cost items that are related to the project. These include the material costs, labor costs, transports and staffing and overhead costs. The project will involve the following cost items
Business Case
This involves setting up a rescue project to help the organization in dealing with emergencies and fire outbreaks. A functional project would ensure that the firm’s reduces the sickness leave as well as safeguarding materials, machinery and other assets from fire damage and other hazard.
Initiating the project would help the firm to prevent mush of the losses and poor services delivery due the effects of damages and sickness leave. The management will ensure that all the relevant procedure and activities are carried out in the right time. The business case will also stipulate the activities and the sequence in which they would be handled. In addition, staff required to do the activities, to ensure smooth running of the activities there should be a well-laid organization structure and job description chart.
Tasks
The management should ensure each staff is assigned to a single activity or a range of activities. Generally, a list of all activities is generated to ensure smooth operations stipulating the number of workers that will be able assigned to each. The task schedule should have break down as follows.
Precedent Chart
This chart is a tabulation of all the activity and the duration that it is expected to take. The precedence chart is recorded in months or weeks depending on the time scale, that was used in planning.
Staffing
At this point, the manager is required to ensure availability of staffs that are competent to work. These staff should be recruited through advertisement of an interview to attract the best skills in the market. After the recruitment process, the management should ensure that a thorough training and orientation process is conducted.
The post of supervisors should be filled with highly competent and experienced persons; the bearer of the position should be able to deal with fire emergencies and rescue operations. Other positions should equally, be filled with competent and work oriented individuals.
Risk Management
The management should ensure the fire and rescue committee is versatile and vigilant in its dealing its mandate. However, risk aspect being uncertain makes its estimation to be difficult to ascertain. Thus, the managers should take their time in ensuring that all risks aspects are taken into consideration. Generally the rescue team should always be prepared to act incase of any emergency or risk occurrence. Finally, the amount of resources deployed should depend on the susceptibility of the organization to fire risks.
The Purpose of the Document
The main purpose of this document is to provide a stable guidance on how and why the project should be carried out. The document also highlights some of the benefits that are associated with the project. Apart from giving a well elaborate procedure on how the fire rescue project would be developed; the document also outlines the relevant steps to be followed.
Owing to the diverse nature of the project, the document provides a simplified outline on the procedures, cost and the benefits emanating from the project. To conclude with, the document provides a well elaborate outline on all activities processes and the time scale associated with each activity.
Complex Problem-Solving Theories
Largely, many firms and organizations find themselves in a situation, which requires a prompt action to salvage their welfare of the organization from imminent danger or losses. The most devastating risk is posed by fire and rescue operations. The two calls for exigency and expertise to be able to save lives of the casualties. To this effect, renowned academicians and scholars have proposed several theories to be employed during such predicaments.
The first theory that prominently stands out among others is the “Robotic hypothesis”. Frensch and Sternberg (1991, p. 300) argue that often risk in fire operations is so complex that no realistic measures can be thought of and implemented towards averting the same. At such instances, managers are encouraged to adopt the robotic hypothesis, which allows action depending on the situation at hand. In such condition, a robot being inanimate proves to be the solution because it has no life and therefore it is able to venture even to the heart of the bonfire.
This theory has become so popular to the extent that the demand for robots has been on the increase in the previous few decades. In most cases, the theory has been proven due to the reliability of the robots in major infernos. The flexibility of the theory cannot be over emphasized due to robots diversity in application and easy of manipulation.
According to Frensch and Sternberg (1991, p. 310) the flexibility of the robots to avoid delay has also proved reliable in other calamities apart from the fire tragic. Engineers have been able to design robots to avoid delay by making the supersonic and more efficient their actions.
Risk Management Plan
Fire and Rescue Operation Project Plan
To effectively deal with the problem that is posed by fire, the management needs to set up the fire and rescue plan. The rescue plan has a hierarchical structure where commands and instructions follow a straight line downwards. The top most section comprise of chiefs who operationalizes the whole action group by issuing directions to the immediate subordinates who in response relay the same information to the junior officers and eventually to the casual laborers.
This structural foundation is important in dealing with rigidity that is often associated with complex structures that impends the urgency at which the action is carried out. The structure gives room to the policy department, which formulates the new guidelines after carrying intensive research in collaboration with the research and redevelopment (R&D). Overall effects of the plan should not only be felt within the firm bit also should trickle down to the public.
Critical Path Analysis (CPA)
Activities in a particular project are represented in a network format; all the activities and processes are assigned specific periods which they will take. The network being a diagrammatical representation helps the manager to illustrate the sequence of activities from initial stage to final activity, each activity is assigned with the resources that it will require. Some activities in the network run concurrently while others only commence after the preceding activities are completed.
Such dependant activities form the critical path and they do not run simultaneously since each activity only commences immediately after the preceding activity is accomplished. In a network, some activities are left out hanging and they do not consume time or resources, such activities are referred as dummy activities. It is also worth noting that activities that do not form part of the critical path may be delayed for sometime without necessarily affecting the overall completion time of the entire project.
Managers, therefore, use the critical path to identify the set of activities, which have no float time-spare time within them. CPA is for that reason critical in identifying activities, which could be delayed without affecting the whole project completion time. This action may be used in the event that resources (labor, material and cash) are inadequate to handle all the activities concurrently. The CPA analysis is a vital tool that that ensures that all activities of a given projects are accorded the undivided attention to ensure the final product is not compromised.
The time required to perform each activity, is the other step involved in the critical path analysis. Critical path shows the maximum time that that the entire project will from commencement until completion this is also the shortest time that the project can take.
CPA time is usually calculated in days or in weeks and the overall time taken by the project is only identified after summing up the time of all the activities in the critical path. Lang (1977, P. 135) asserts that time taken by individual activity should sum up to total time taken by all activities.
Application of Academic Theory to the Practice of Project Management
Apart from projects, being weapons of addressing some demanding concerns it is also a discipline, which encompasses systematic planning of management resources (Newbold, 1998, P.164).
However, Newbold (1998, P. 165) does agree that there are other theories, which have been proposed to better understand project management. In addition, Newbold (1998, P. 165) singles out that theories are mainly aimed at helping students easily grasp the concepts just as they are effective in practice where managers borrow heavily from them.
Gantt Charts
Related to the concept of the CPA is the theory of the Gantt charts. Gant chart is a graphical illustration of activities in a project and the way time that each is allotted. Walker (2007, P.135) identifies Gantt chart as one of those theories that are applicable effectively both to the students within their classroom understandings as well as on the field by managers.
The above is a simpliefied representation of a gantt chanrt, it represent the various activities that a process undertakes. Due to its elaborate nature, Gantt charts saves the managers the laborious process of computing the float time as is done in the CPA. However, this does not overrule the importance of been keen in preparation of the chart as a slight mistake might mean the whole project is messed up.
Communication Skills
Communication is the heart of any organization; both directions and procedures are disseminated by art of passing information. Nevertheless, its significance to understand that ineffective communication causes confusion and misunderstanding within the work mates reading to delayed realization of the intended goals.
Consequently, the manager ought to be command good communication skills to ensure that activities are conducted in the intended manner. The manager should hold regular meetings with his staff to obtain their opinion in an attempted to involve them in decision-making.
Equally, effective communication enables the manager to impacts the essential skills and knowledge to the staff. Schwartz (2001, P.35) adds that the manager should possess good communication skills such that he can be able to pass information without causing any confusion or misunderstandings to the workers. However, communication is a wholesome of activities but Schwartz (2001, P.35) identifies two aspects that are so important to a manager-presentation and briefing.
For an effective communication, the manager should ensure that he plans his work thoroughly to reduce the time used to enhance audience concentration. Brief leaflets that are issued to the audience to cultivate their participation should also accompany the presentation. In addition, a successful presentation should also involve PowerPoint projectors in order to allow easier following by the audience.
Schwartz (2001, p.37) argues that complex, concepts and diagrammatical presentations should be done using the PowerPoint projections to avoid confusion. It also imperative to ensure only the main points are captured to ensure that minimum time is spending on the presentation. Managers should also bear in mind that the language and layout used to prepare is simple and easy to understand. Finally, an effective presentation should take around twenty minutes and then give rooms for the audience to seek clarifications or ask questions.
The other that is of great importance in communication is briefing. The manager should stage regular briefing to the staff to ensure that the audiences are well versed with the concept. Constant reminders augment the retention capacity for each individual as well as helping to internalize the concept.
The choice of media selected should be critical to ensure that the target groups are all accommodated. Generally, briefs should be direct and straight to the point. Very little time should be allocated for the briefs to avoid losing the concentration of the staffs.
Problem-Solving Methods
Managers are entitled to ensuring that problems are addressed immediately i.e. as soon as they arise. Alternatively, rather than waiting for problems to occur, managers are encouraged to prevent problems beforehand. Conversely, understanding the root cause of the problem is a vital measure of ensuring a lasting solution is affected.
The managers use strategic measures to ensure that whey address all the unavoidable losses or mitigating the extent of the damage that may be caused by the problem. Problem protection is a rigorous activity that requires vigilant and utmost determination to ensure that optimal action is employed.
During the course of management, the managers use two main tools to ensure the project remains strategically positioned to deal both the external and internal challenge. The two tools are these: SWOT analysis and the PESTEL analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat. This analytical tool guarantees the project is in opposition to cope with all the immediate challenges that it faces on daily basis.
On the other hand, PESTEL stands for, Political, Economical, social, Technological, Environmental and Legal force. For any project to be viable, all the above, must be adhered to, otherwise the project will be deemed illegal. Hence, it is the mandate of the project manager to ensure that the project aspires to meet all required condition or to make corrective measures to ensure total compliance.
Project Initiation Document (PID)
This document is a summarized portfolio that represents all finer details of the project. The PID summaries all the objectives or the mandate of the project before it is executed. The management is also expected to express all the benefits, which accrue from the project, stipulating how various groups’ needs would be met such as the firm and the public. Conversely, PID includes a breakdown of the expected costs against various activities.
The other issues, which are captured by the PID, are the criteria for solving problems, which is employed by the management. Finally, the manager is expected to draft a precedent chart highlighting the progression of the activities and the staffs expected to engineer the whole process (Flouris & Lock, 2009, p.124).
Conclusion
Project management is very complex and multifaceted to an extent that not a single dimension can satisfactorily explain it. The fire rescue and rescue project is expected to help ease the effects if sickness absence. Although the project is so involving, the management has taken upon themselves to steer head the operations.
The project has proven to be vital in ensuring that the firm’s goals and production activities are not halted by unforeseen emergencies. Once the project is full operational, the management should employ evaluation tools to assess the progress of the project to ascertain whether the project meets its expectations. If the goals of the project are not met, the management has the obligation to authorize the entire project or parts of the project to be reexamined.
References
Flouris, T. G., & Lock, D., 2009. Managing Aviation Projects from Concept to Completion. Ashgate Publishing: Hampshire
Frensch. A., & Sternberg, R., 1991. Complex Problem Solving: Principles and Mechanisms. Routledge Publishers: New Jersey
Lang, W. G., 1977. Critical Path Analysis in Practice. Taylor and Francis Publishers: London.
Newbold, R., 1977. Project Management in the Fast Lane; Applying the Theory of Constraints. St. Lucie Publishers: New York
Schwartz, A., E., 2001. Communication Skills. Edward &Schwartz Publishers: California.
Walker, A., 2007. Project Management in Construction. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.