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 72% 0% 76% 0% 23% 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 Cost Functionality Stakeholder Overall Rank 2 88% 29% 77% 54% 54% 6 3 89% 44% 73% 58% 61% 6 4 89% 51% 74% 58% 65% 4 5 83% 56% 67% 60% 63% 4 6 87% 61% 66% 61% 68% 3 7 87% 64% 62% 64% 68% 3 8 89% 70% 63% 64% 73% 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.

Period Team Efficiency

Team Cohesion

Team Composition

Team Longevity

1 80% 95% 92% 100% 2 81% 95% 90% 100% 3 82% 94% 90% 97% 4 80% 84% 88% 67% 5 81% 81% 90% 57% 6 82% 80% 90% 54% 7 83% 79% 90% 49% 8 84% 76% 91% 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.