Proposed Solution
The Big Dig, and other small and large industrial projects, deserve a team dedicated to rigorous supervision of progress, finance, and quality in order to ensure that the venture is remaining on a path of continued success. The numerous amount of resources and large sum of funding that was needed for this project were too great to manage and allocate without proper planning, coordination, and control. Knowing this, we believe that a more detailed Construction Project Management system and strategy could have saved Big Dig supporters copious amounts of money, time and effort.
Although a team was formed for this purpose, they were assigned extremely late in the process and it was evident they were not doing their job successfully. With a proper and competent CPM team, managers could have determined the scope of their project more practically and had a better chance of effectively allocating the project’s resources and managing any changes or unexpected troubles. By making better use of project charters, PERT analyses, milestones and Gantt Charts, workers would have been more likely to stay on task and be more motivated to understand how they can accomplish tasks via the critical path. Every project is made up of a series of connected activities, each of which has its own constraints, and the Big Dig workers could have put more effort into finding the optimal sequence of actions that would ensure a successful completion. By conducting more frequent phase-gates and project reviews the CPM team could have assessed the issues they were facing in a more rational way, tested the development and feasibility of each step of the project and better quantified and analyzed measurable results. By holding more PMO meetings and review sessions, this team could have identified, evaluated and monitored risks more effectively and made the necessary changes to help