New Jersey Institute of Technology

Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Name: Carlos Vanegas Date: 02/07/2020

Course: Engineering Management IE492-452

Assignment: Week 3
1. What is a WBS? What is a RAM? How are they related?
The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is a deliverable-oriented hierarchical
decomposition of the project work into small work packages that produce the project
deliverables. These packages will be assigned to every person involved in the project
at different scales.
The Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM) illustrates who will be
responsible for a certain work. It is a tool used to designate the individuals responsible
for accomplishing the work items cited in the WBS.
The RAM shows all the individuals associated with each work item in the WBS,
both structures complement each other since the WBS decompose the project into
small work packages and the RAM designates the person responsible for
accomplishing each small package.

2. Does the scheduling function depend on the planning function? If so, which one
must be done first?
The scheduling function depends on the planning function. The planning
function must be done before the scheduling function. Any activity involved in a
project must be planned first in order to be scheduled.
While a plan might be the same throughout the project, the schedule is more
likely to change during the execution of the activity. The schedule is the timetable
where planned activities have an assigned period of time.
3. What is agile project management? How does it differ from a
traditional/waterfall project management?
Agile Project Management is an approach to reduce product development time
while minimizing risk through continuous interactions between the customer and small
self-organized teams that produce increments of working product features in short-
time iterations while rapidly adapting to changes in requirements.
This definition means that a product is developed while a designer team interacts
directly with customers, allowing a quick change in the product if necessary, reducing
development time and costs.
The waterfall method is a traditional project management approach which
defines phases that have to be completed in order to move forward in the project while
the agile method can adapt to the circumstances in order to reduce time and risk if there
are any changes in the requirements.
The traditional method would not adapt very effectively if there are changes in
the requirements of a product or service. Therefore, the risk and the time in completing
the project successfully will increase since those requirements might change the entire
structure of a project.
Another reason some projects use the agile method is that they can test the
product while it is still in the final development process, the traditional method tests a
product at the end of the project, whether or not it works, while the agile method tests
the product throughout the project. This allows the development team to change
specifications or designs according to the customer experience.

4. What type of projects would you not apply agile project methodology to?
Agile project management is emphasized to short-term planning and intense
work efforts in short fixed time cycles. Therefore, applying this method to long-term
projects might result not only in a management disaster but also in an engineering
disaster.
Civil projects, such as the construction of highways or bridges will not be a good
option for this method since any kind of calculation can change after the beginning of
the construction. Mechanical Engineering Projects (in my case) such as machinery
design is also a case where I would not use the agile project method, since again, the
customer and the designer have to agree in all the specifications and all the terms before
the construction of the equipment begins. I would say that there are cases where this
 method could be used to medium-scale engineering projects such as the reconstruction
of a home or the design of HVAC systems, but the change in customer specifications
might bring risks and more time to complete a project successfully.
Bibliography
 Gido, Jack, et al. Successful Project Management. Cengage Learning, 2018.