Communication Case

* Do you always know what resources will be required for a project? Why or why not?

Before I can estimate the duration for each task, I must have a good idea of the quantity and type of resources that will be assigned to each task. But sometimes it is hard to include all the resources because of many reasons, such as ill conceived for the reality of situation. For example, holding a meeting in a hotel's meeting room, sometimes the leader forget to assign IT people to help set up the computer, so the host may spend one hour to figure out how to set up the computer and the meeting will be delayed. It is important that people who help determine what resources are necessary include people who have experience and expertise in similar projects and with the organization performing the project (Schwalbe, 2012).

* Would uncertainty about the potential availability of resources cause you to do anything different when you estimate durations? Why or why not?

I think the uncertainty of the resources' availability has some impact on the duration estimation, because resource availability is a key source of negative risk to projects. Even if the project has well defined scope and top managing team, it is hard to have a good schedule outcome with the uncertainty in resource availability.

* If you don't have resource information, how could you estimate durations? Why?

The accuracy of the duration estimation will be very poor without the resource information, but sometimes it happens. Firstly, I would use some analogous activities for reference to finish the estimation. Secondly, I will add a little padding to increase the probability and reduce the risk of being late, although the cost for the project will be higher but it is the most safe way to estimate without resource information (Larson & Gray,2011).