Sim Project Analysis In the business world proper planning, budget

Matthew Norton
Ryan Latham
Nived Hariprisad
Oliver Huntley
Sim Project Analysis
In the business world proper planning, budget analysis, staffing
decisions and other managerial actions are all necessary to move a project
towards completion. Sim Project simulates many of these real world
conditions as we learned in our pseudo project manager positions.
We started the simulation with poor staffing decisions. Our resource
allocation was also misguided; we had multiple part time allocations for
almost all of the tasks. As a result of this poor strategic planning after period
1 our team was in 10th place.
Period Time
Cost
Functionality
Stakeholder
Overall Rank
1
0%
76%
0%
23%
72%
10
Due to the inefficiency of our staff working on part time assignments split
between multiple tasks our costs were immense. Unallocated resources
totaled almost $40,000 and training unexpectedly costing a total of more
than $12,000. Our team’s costs and stakeholder categories suffered the most
as shown above. This is when we realized if we didn’t revaluate our current
strategy we wouldn’t be able to recover from the incredible costs we accrued
in period 1.
We identified the most important aspect of the NanoWorks project
and built a strategy around it, cost. Our revised strategy to cut costs
included: minimizing resources, this includes hiring employees just before
they are needed and firing them after their task is complete; in addition,
assigning only one employee to a single task. In order to do this we knew
that our functionality would suffer slightly in longer tasks but our
unallocated resource cost would be much lower by only having assigned
resources on staff. Our hiring criteria also changed. Instead of overbidding to
guarantee hiring the highest ranked employees we first inspected the task
information. There you can see the estimated hours for the task and
estimated cost, then it can be broken down to an estimated hourly rate. We
tried to stay as close to this estimate as possible when bidding while also
taking into consideration the possible employee’s training and experience as
an indicator whether to make an offer. Our revised strategy included
incurring no training costs, so we wanted our employees to have the best
potential of working at efficient levels.
After employing our new strategy significant results were
immediately evident:
Period Time
2
88%
3
89%
4
89%
5
83%
6
87%
7
87%
8
89%
Cost
29%
44%
51%
56%
61%
64%
70%
Functionality Stakeholder Overall
77%
54%
54%
73%
58%
61%
74%
58%
65%
67%
60%
63%
66%
61%
68%
62%
64%
68%
63%
64%
73%
Rank
6
6
4
4
3
3
3
Our costs and stakeholder categories steadily improved along with our
overall rank. Our functionality is the only area we experienced a slight
decline: only a 13% fluctuation overall. Costs percentile saw an increase of
70% and stakeholder 64%. These improvements in cost allowed us to finish
in 3rd place from 10th place in period 1. It is clear that our cost strategy was
extremely effective.
Team
Period Efficiency
1
80%
2
81%
3
82%
4
80%
5
81%
6
82%
7
83%
8
84%
Team
Cohesion
95%
95%
94%
84%
81%
80%
79%
76%
Team
Composition
92%
90%
90%
88%
90%
90%
90%
91%
Team
Longevity
100%
100%
97%
67%
57%
54%
49%
38%
When functionality is broken down to its separate categories you can
easily observe what areas affected our performance. Team cohesion suffered
a 19% total decrease and longevity a 62% drop. We attribute this poor
performance to the constant hiring and firing of employees which prevented
the team from becoming a cohesive group.
After reviewing our simulation strategy it is clear that our cost
strategy is very productive when cost is the most heavily weighted category.
The only change that could have allowed us be more competitive may have
been to assign two employees to tasks over 200 hours. We did see a decrease
in efficiency over longer tasks with a single employee, assigning another
employee might help increase efficiency in these longer tasks.
We felt that SimProject was a helpful tool in learning some of the
things required of project managers. It can help you understand things such
as budgeting and work breakdown structures but, computer software can’t
emulate the social environment or organizational culture of the business
world. People are unpredictable and it’s hard to place a number on criteria
like team cohesion or composition. But the end goal is to help understand
the different variables that project managers must consider on a daily basis
and this is where SimProject succeeds.