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Project Profiling

Exercises

Exercises at the end of the chapter are designed to strengthen your understanding and retention of the information recently acquired in the chapter.

Essay Questions

Write several paragraphs to provide more in-depth analysis and consideration when answering the following questions.

  1. Compare the attributes used by the Darnall-Preston Complexity Index and those used by Youker. Which attributes are used in both typologies? Which attributes are not in common? If you chose to add one attribute to either typology what would it be? Explain your answer.
  2. Complex systems. A complex system adapts to changes in its external and internal characteristics. Describe a project with which you are familiar that has experienced changes in its external or internal characteristics during the life of the project and describe how the project manager and the management team changed their behavior to adapt to the new situation or how they failed to adapt and the result of that failure.

Discussion

The exercises in this section are designed to promote exchange of information among students in the classroom or in an online discussion. The exercises are more open ended, which means that what you find might be completely different from what your classmates find, and you can all benefit by sharing what you have learned.

  1. Institutional memory. One of the responsibilities of a project manager is to keep a history of past projects to create an organizational knowledge base. Do you think using the DPCI™ as a basis for organizing those past projects would be useful? How would you go about creating a storage and retrieval system that uses the DPCI?
  2. Environmental impact. Describe a project that might have an impact on the environment and the steps the project manager might have to take. Describe the score you would give this attribute if you were using the DPCI.