Project Execution and Control

Weekly Reflections

The general process of a project is as follows:

Project management is essentially about “people”. You have to work effectively with stakeholders, senior managers, and functional managers. If you are in a matrix organization, most of these people have to provide resources for your project.

Project Constraints

The constraints of a project include four aspects: PCTS:

C=f(P,T,S)

• P - Quality requirements in terms of technology and function
• C - Labor costs in work (Note: Major equipment and material costs should be calculated separately from labor costs)
• T - Time specified by the project
• S - Scope and scale of work.

In a project, it is impossible to do all four PCTS items well at the same time, and choices must be made. To this end, a feasible plan must be formulated.

Formulate a Plan

The principles of formulating a plan are roughly as follows:

• The duration of each task should not exceed 4-6 weeks.
• The duration of design or software work should not exceed 1-3 weeks.
• All tasks must have a sign to indicate the completion of the task.

Project Schedule Control

To control the progress of a project, you need to know two things - where we should be and where we are. The project management system will tell you where you are now.

If you want to understand the status of the project, you must know how much cost has been spent so far, whether the work meets the functional and technical requirements (that is, performance), whether the work is proceeding according to the planned schedule, and whether the scope of work of the project is correct. In the formula, cost is easy to control, but time is the most difficult to measure. Especially knowledge-based work. The progress of knowledge-based work is usually shown as the curve in the figure below. On this curve, for a considerable period of time, the work has only made minor progress, then suddenly accelerated, and near the end, the progress slowed down again.

Measuring the progress of knowledge-based work is difficult, and can be implemented according to the slicing principle. According to the slicing principle, the duration of knowledge-based tasks should not exceed 1-3 weeks, and must have its own end sign. For software or engineering design, the exit sign may be that the design has been analyzed by colleagues and everyone agrees that the design meets the requirements.

Handling Deviations

When tracking a project, you must ask yourself three questions at any time.

• What is the real situation of the work?
• When a deviation occurs, what is the cause of the deviation?
• What action should be taken to correct the deviation?

Weekly Events

Alibaba was fined. Will BAT converge in the future and no longer enter new entrepreneurial tracks without restraint, affecting the normal development of the industry?

Industry Trends

Recently, China Unicom released the 6G White Paper, which deeply analyzed the development trends and vision of 6G business, 6G network indicators and candidate technologies, 6G future research planning and implementation concepts, etc. China Unicom proposed the overall development vision of 6G, which can be summarized in 8 words: Intelligent, Integrated, Green, Trusted. Overall, the future 6G network will achieve full-domain integration and extreme connectivity, providing users with flexible and open services customized on demand, while evolving capabilities in directions such as intelligent native, digital twin, green sharing, computing-network integration, and security and trustworthiness.

Published at: Apr 11, 2021 · Modified at: Dec 4, 2025