Drag Cost
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Drag Cost
Drag cost is a project management metric developed by Stephen Devaux as part of the Total Project Control (TPC) approach to project schedule and cost analysis. It is the amount by which a project’s expected return on investment (ROI) is reduced due to the critical path drag of a specific critical path activity Task (project management) or other specific schedule factor such as a schedule lag or other delaying constraint.Stephen A. Devau"The Drag Efficient: The Missing Quantification of Time on the Critical Path" Defense AT&L magazine of the Defense Acquisition University. Drag cost is computed at the activity level, but is caused by the impact at the project level due to: 1. A reduction in a project's expected value because of later completion, or 2. An increase in a project's cost due to its indirect costs being increased because of a longer project duration. Drag cost computation is often used on projects in order to justify additional project resources Resource refers to ...
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Project Management
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. The primary constraints are scope, time, and budget. The secondary challenge is to optimize the allocation of necessary inputs and apply them to meet pre-defined objectives. The objective of project management is to produce a complete project which complies with the client's objectives. In many cases, the objective of project management is also to shape or reform the client's brief to feasibly address the client's objectives. Once the client's objectives are clearly established, they should influence all decisions made by other people involved in the project – for example, project managers, designers, contractors, and subcontractors. Ill-defined or too tightly prescribed project management objectives are detrimental to decision-maki ...
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Total Project Control
Total project control (TPC) is a project management method that emphasizes continuous tracking and optimization of return on investment (ROI). It was developed by Stephen Devaux. It builds upon earlier techniques such as earned value management, critical path method, and program evaluation and review technique, but uses these to track and index projected project profitability as well as the more traditional cost and schedule. In this way it aims to manage projects as profit and investment centers, rather than cost centers. Introduced with TPC are a variety of project management metrics and techniques, among them critical path drag, the value breakdown structure (VBS), Devaux's Index of Project Performance (the DIPP), Doubled Resource Estimated Duration (DRED), and Cost of Leveling with Unresolved Bottlenecks (CLUB). The Project Management Institute's monthly magazine PM Network reviewed the TPC methodology as making "solid points about what can be done to maximize ROI during ...
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Project
A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of events: a "set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations". A project may be a temporary (rather than a permanent) social system ( work system), possibly staffed by teams (within or across organizations) to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints. A project may form a part of wider programme management or function as an ''ad hoc'' system. Note that open-source software "projects" or artists' musical "projects" (for example) may lack defined team-membership, precise planning and/or time-limited durations. Overview The word ''project'' comes from the Latin word ''projectum'' from the Latin verb ''proicere'', "before an action," which in turn comes from ''pro-'', which d ...
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Return On Investment
Return on investment (ROI) or return on costs (ROC) is a ratio between net income (over a period) and investment (costs resulting from an investment of some resources at a point in time). A high ROI means the investment's gains compare favourably to its cost. As a performance measure, ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiencies of several different investments.Return On Investment – ROI
, Investopedia as accessed 8 January 2013
In economic terms, it is one way of relating profits to capital invested.


Purpose

In business, the pur ...
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Critical Path Drag
Critical path drag is a project management metric developed by Stephen Devaux as part of the Total Project Control (TPC) approach to schedule analysis and compression in the critical path method of scheduling. Critical path drag is the amount of time that an activity or constraint on the critical path is adding to the project duration. Alternatively, it is the maximum amount of time that one can shorten the activity before it is no longer on the critical path or before its duration becomes zero. In networks where all dependencies are finish-to-start (FS) relationships (i.e., where a predecessor must finish before a successor starts), the drag of a critical path activity is equal to whichever is less: its remaining duration or (if there is one or more parallel activity) the total float of the parallel activity that has the least total float.Stephen A. Devau"The Drag Efficient: The Missing Quantification of Time on the Critical Path" Defense AT&L magazine of the Defense Acquisition ...
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Task (project Management)
In project management, a task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a defined period of time or by a deadline to work towards work-related goals. It is a small essential piece of a job that serves as a means to differentiate various components of a project. A task can be broken down into assignments which should also have a defined start and end date or a deadline for completion. One or more assignments on a task puts the task under execution. Completion of all assignments on a specific task normally renders the task completed. Tasks can be linked together to create dependencies. Tasks completion generally requires the coordination of others. Coordinated human interaction takes on the role of combining the integration of time, energy, effort, ability, and resources of multiple individuals to meet a common goal. Coordination can also be thought of as the critical mechanism that links or ties together the efforts on the singular level to that of the larger task being ...
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Indirect Costs
Indirect costs are costs that are not directly accountable to a cost object (such as a particular project, facility, function or product). Like direct costs, indirect costs may be either fixed or variable. Indirect costs include administration, personnel and security costs. These are those costs which are not directly related to production. Some indirect costs may be overhead, but other overhead costs can be directly attributed to a project and are direct costs. There are two types of indirect costs. One are the fixed indirect costs, which are unchanged for a particular project or company, like transportation of labor to the working site, building temporary roads, etc. The other are recurring indirect costs, which repeat for a particular company, like maintenance of records or the payment of salaries. Indirect vs direct costs Most cost estimates are broken down into direct costs and indirect costs. Direct costs are directly attributable to the object. In construction, the costs o ...
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Resources
Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon their availability — they are classified into renewable and non-renewable resources. They can also be classified as actual and potential on the basis of the level of development and use, on the basis of origin they can be classified as biotic and abiotic, and on the basis of their distribution, as ubiquitous and localised (private, community-owned, national and international resources). An item becomes a resource with time and developing technology. The benefits of resource utilization may include increased wealth, proper functioning of a system, or enhanced well-being. From a human perspective, a natural resource is anything obtained from the environment to satisfy human needs and wants.WanaGopa - Nyawakan From a broader biological or ecologic ...
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Cost Engineering
Cost engineering is "the engineering practice devoted to the management of project cost, involving such activities as estimating, cost control, cost forecasting, investment appraisal and risk analysis". "Cost Engineers budget, plan and monitor investment projects. They seek the optimum balance between cost, quality and time requirements." Skills and knowledge of cost engineers are similar to those of quantity surveyors. In many industries, cost engineering is synonymous with project controls. As the title "engineer" has legal requirements in many jurisdictions (i.e. Texas, Canada), the cost engineering discipline is often renamed to project controls. A cost engineer is "an engineer whose judgment and experience are utilized in the application of scientific principles and techniques to problems of estimation; cost control; business planning and management science; profitability analysis; project management; and planning and scheduling". Overview One key objective of cost eng ...
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