4squareviews

This is a summary of the sixth part of twenty-four in the course on the New Testament presented by The Teaching Company. The lectures in this course are by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His expertise is in the Greco-Roman cultural environment of early Christianity and the textual criticism of the New Testament. For those who are interested in purchasing this course and listening to the complete lectures, please go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com.

This post covers the second part of the lecture; see the previous post for the first part.

10. Matthew’s editing of the Genealogy according to 1 Chronicles

Why would Matthew change the genealogy that he inherited from 1 Chronicles? Apparently because he wanted to show that something significant happened every 14 generations. If he included all the generations between Joram and Uzziah, then he would no longer have the sequence of 14 generations.

There are other problems with this sequence of 14 generations, one of which being that the final sequence of 14 actually contains only 13 names. Matthew, though, is trying to make a point, and the point is not really about the historical accuracy of his genealogy; the point is about Jesus. He’s trying to say that Jesus really was the Jewish Messiah descended from the venerable Jewish line of David. His genealogy is constructed in order to show that there was divine Providence behind the appearance of Jesus at this particular point in time.

11. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth

Jesus’ Jewishness continues to be at the forefront in the stories that come next in Matthew’s Gospel, stories that again are not found in Mark, stories of Jesus’ miraculous birth.

Probably the most striking thing about these stories as found in Matthew is that they mirror the accounts of the birth of Moses in the Hebrew Bible. You can compare the accounts of Luke and Matthew about Jesus’ birth because they both give narratives of Jesus’ birth, but they are both very different from one another. The stories found in Luke are not the stories found in Matthew and vice versa. In Matthew’s account, there is no word about Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, taking a trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem because there is a tax that Caesar Augustus has levied, and the entire world has to go register for a census, and so they just happen to be in Bethlehem that weekend. In Matthew’s account, Mary and Joseph are just in Bethlehem and Jesus is born there. There is no account in Matthew of the shepherds coming to worship Jesus. In Matthew’s account instead there are the wise men who come to worship Jesus.

The way the story goes in Matthew’s Gospel after the recounting of the genealogy is that Jesus is born in Bethlehem, there are wise men who are following a star who eventually come to Bethlehem apparently some months later, because we find out that King Herod learns that these wise men have come, and he decides that he wants to kill this child who has been born. And so he sends his soldiers out, and they kill every child two years and under in Bethlehem. Well, why two years and under? If Jesus was born just last night, surely the soldiers would recognize that some toddler running around in the yard wasn’t born last night. It’s because these wise men in fact have taken months to come to Bethlehem.

Joseph learns in a dream, though, that Herod is sending out the troops, and is warned to flee, so they flee to Egypt. We are told that they flee to Egypt, so that God can fulfill a scripture about Jesus, “out of Egypt have I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). When Joseph and Mary learn then that King Herod has eventually died, they return. Where are they going to return? In Matthew’s Gospel, they want to return to Bethlehem, presumably because it’s their home town. But they learn that the ruler now in Bethlehem is Archelaus, Herod’s son, who is even worse than his father, so they decide to relocate in Nazareth. And so the reason Jesus is raised in Nazareth is because his parents have to relocate there after fleeing back out of Egypt.

These stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew, unlike in Luke, are interesting because they mirror the accounts of Moses’ birth. With Moses, again a child is born under a hostile regime, Egypt rather than Rome. In Moses’ case as well, the ruling power wants to destroy him. In Moses’ case too, he is divinely protected. He sojourns in Egypt. He leaves Egypt. He goes through the water. In Moses’ case, of course, it’s the water of the Red Sea during the Exodus. In Jesus’ case, immediately after the stories of his birth, he is baptized. In other words, it skips all of those years from his infancy and his adulthood. The next story is that he goes through the waters of baptism. And then, he goes out into the wilderness to be tempted, just like how Moses and the children of Israel went into the wilderness. In their case, it was for 40 years; in the case of Jesus, it was for 40 days. And then , Jesus comes from the wilderness and goes up onto the mountain to deliver his teaching, his new Law, just as Moses went up on Mt. Sinai to deliver God’s law.

12. Matthew’s Jesus: The New Moses

Matthew has told the stories about Jesus’ birth precisely in order to call into mind the birth of Moses. Why the birth of Moses? Because for Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is a new Moses, a new Savior of the people of Israel. Not one who stands in contradiction to or in tension with Moses himself, but a new Moses who fulfills the Law of Moses and delivers its correct interpretation. Matthew doesn’t understand the choice for people in his day to between Moses and Jesus. Matthew, as we are going to see, is not propounding that followers of Jesus have to reject Judaism. On the contrary, followers of Jesus, according to Matthew, have to affirm Judaism. But it is Judaism as interpreted by Jesus. It’s not a choice between Moses and Jesus; it’s a choice between Moses without Jesus and Moses with Jesus. And according to the Gospel of Matthew, it’s only Moses with Jesus that is the proper interpretation of the Law of Moses.

Some people have pointed out the striking fact that in Matthew’s Gospel, unlike Mark and unlike Luke, there are five major blocks of Jesus’ teaching, the first of which is the Sermon on the Mount in chapters 5 through 7. Much of this material is not found in Mark; most of it is found in “Q”. But why are five blocks of his teaching? Is it to make a parallel to the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch? It’s a possibility.

13. Jesus and the Fulfillment of Jewish Law

It’s important further to recognize that these stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew’s Gospel are all explicitly said to fulfill the Scripture. We’re told by Matthew that Jesus was born of a virgin and we’re told why, because according to Isaiah 7:14, “a virgin shall conceive and bear a child and you shall call him Emanuel.” There’s a question of whether Isaiah itself was referring to the birth of a child through a virgin. When you read the text in Hebrew, it doesn’t in fact say a virgin will conceive and bear a child, it says a young woman will conceive and bear a child, but the Christian quotation of it in Matthew indicates that she was to be a virgin; Jesus’ birth therefore fulfills Scripture.

He’s born in Bethelem. Why? Well, Matthew says it is because it is according to the prophet Micah, who says that the Savior will come from Bethlehem. He flees to Egypt. Why? Because Scripture says in Hosea 11:1: “out of Egypt have I called my son.”

At every point, the events surrounding Jesus’ birth are said to fulfill Scripture. Why this emphasis, which is found only in Matthew? Precisely because Matthew is trying to show that Jesus fulfills everything that God predicted in the Scriptures. Jesus in other words is the Jewish fulfillment of the Jewish law given by the Jewish God. He is the one who, like Moses, will deliver God’s Law to his people. This emphasis on the Law that Jesus gives is particularly to be found in the first block of his teaching, the so-called Sermon on the Mount.

14. The Sermon on the Mount: The Antitheses

Jesus goes up on a mountain, much as Moses went to Mt. Sinai and then delivers his teaching. He begins the Sermon on the Mount, not by espousing an entirely new teaching, but interpreting for his hearers the teachings of Moses in the so-called “Antitheses,” the Antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount.

The Sermon on the Mount is chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew. The Antitheses come after he has given the Beatitudes, where he begins to interpret what Moses said, and gives his own reading of what Moses means. Jesus says, for example, “you have heard it said that you shall not murder, and that whoever murders shall be liable to judgment. But I say to you that everyone who gets angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment. You have heard it said that you shall not commit adultery. I say to you, you should not even lust after a woman in your heart. You have heard it said ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. I say to you, turn the other cheek.”

Jesus gives the Law of Moses and then gives his interpretation of the Law. These teachings are called the Antitheses because Jesus sets his own understanding of his teaching in opposition to other understandings of the teaching. It’s not that Jesus is contradicting what Moses himself says. In other words, Jesus doesn’t say, “Moses says you shall not murder, but I say you should.” These Antitheses instead are giving alternative interpretations of the Law of Moses which go beyond the literal level down to the point of the spirit of the Law. “Moses said don’t kill; I say don’t even get angry.” “Moses said don’t commit adultery; I say don’t even lust.” Jesus wants his followers to not only follow the letter of the Law, but it’s very spirit.

Some readers have assumed that Jesus can’t really be serious: Jesus can’t really expect people not to get angry or not to lust. Prof. Ehrman says, however, that Matthew in fact seems to think that Jesus is quite serious. Matthew gives no indication that he thinks that these are impossible commandments, quite the contrary. Matthew indicates that Jesus’ followers are to keep the Law even better than the Jewish leaders of his own day. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, verses 17-20, found only in Matthew, “don’t suppose that I came to destroy the Law and the prophets; I did not come to destroy them, but to fulfill them. Truly I say to you, until Heaven and Earth pass away, not one letter, not even a small part of a letter, will pass away from the Law until it all takes place.” Whoever loosens the least of these Commandments and teaches others to do likewise will be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven.” Then he concludes by saying “truly I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Jesus insists that his followers keep the Law and keep it even better than the scribes and Pharisees.

Well, how is that possible? Matthew evidently does not think it is possible simply by making a list of do’s and don’ts that everyone has to follow. To some extent, following the Law of God for Matthew is a very simple affair, as we learn later in the Gospel in chapter 22, where a Jewish teacher comes up to Jesus and says to him, “what is the heart of the Law?”, and Jesus quotes two of the Law’s commandments, “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, and your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Anyone who truly follows those two commandments fulfills the Law and does so better than the scribes and the Pharisees.

15. Jesus’ criticism of Jewish leaders

In fact, in this Gospel, the emphasis on following the Jewish Law and the emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus himself is counterbalanced by Jesus’ forceful opposition to the Jewish leaders, whom Jesus does not think follow the Law very well. In fact, Jesus portrays them as hypocrites who demand that people follow the Law but don’t do so themselves. Particularly striking is chapter 23, which shows Matthew’s vehement opposition to the scribes and the Pharisees, where Jesus calls his opponents, the Jewish leaders, “white-washed sepulchers”, meaning they look clean on the outside, but filled with rot and corruption within. He calls them “hypocrites” who don’t practice what they preach. He says that they stress what is picayune, they don’t keep what is central, but keep only little bits of the law, they strain out gnats but they swallow camels. They are portrayed as godless and heartless blind leaders who know the right thing to do, but don’t raise a finger to do it themselves.

Matthew’s Gospel is sometimes thought of as being anti-Semitic because of this harsh opposition to the Jewish leaders. Prof. Ehrman stresses, however, that there is nothing in this Gospel itself that condemns Jews per se, only the Jewish leaders. Even in the most vitriolic attack on the Jewish leaders, Jesus does not condemn the Jewish people per se.

Probably the most poignant scene is at Jesus’ own trial before Pilate, where Pilate claims that Jesus is innocent and he washes his hands of Jesus’ blood, which is found only in Matthew. The Jewish crowds cry out, “his blood be upon us and our children.” Some people have taken this as a condemnation of the Jewish people. But it’s worth noting that in the context, it’s the Jewish leaders that have urged the people to say this. It’s the Jewish leaders who are at fault for leading the Jewish people astray.

16. Conclusion

This Gospel does not condemn Judaism or Jews; it condemns the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day. In conclusion, this Gospel is a lot like Mark. Here too, Jesus dies as the son of God for the sins of the world, but the emphasis here is a lot more on the Jewishness of Jesus. Jesus here is the Jewish Messiah, sent from the Jewish God, in fulfillment of the Jewish Law. Jesus as the Messiah gives the true interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures to his Jewish followers and he expects these followers to keep the Jewish law even better than the scribers at the Pharisees.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

This is a summary of the sixth part of twenty-four in the course on the New Testament presented by The Teaching Company. The lectures in this course are by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His expertise is in the Greco-Roman cultural environment of early Christianity and the textual criticism of the New Testament. For those who are interested in purchasing this course and listening to the complete lectures, please go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com.

1. Introduction: Jesus, the Jewish Messiah

At this point in our study, we have begun to examine the individual Gospels of the New Testament to see how they each portray Jesus. Our assumption has been that each Gospel is distinctive, and that it is important to see how each author individually portrays Jesus.

We began with Mark, since by common assent it was the earliest of the Gospels to be written. Mark portrays Jesus as the powerful but almost universally misunderstood son of God who, despite common expectations, had to suffer and die.

2. Matthew—One of the Synoptic Gospels

We can now move on to Matthew, a Gospel widely thought to be the most Jewish in its understanding of Jesus. In many ways, both Matthew and Luke are very similar to Mark. In fact, there are entire passages that the three Gospels share, sometimes telling the very same stories word for word the same. For this reason, scholars have long called these three books the Synoptic Gospels. The word “Synoptic” comes from two Greek words which mean “seen together”. It’s possible to lay these Gospels—Matthew, Mark and Luke–side by side and see them together. They tell many of the same stories, often in the same words.

As we will see, this is not the case with the Gospel of John, which has very few stories in common with the other three Gospels. For centuries, scholars have agreed that the Synoptic Gospels have so many stories in common because they used the same sources for their information about Jesus. The reason why they tell the same stories, and the reason why these stories are sometimes word for word the same, is because they are using the same sources. More specifically, it’s now generally thought that Matthew and Luke both had a copy of Mark available to them, and that they borrowed from Mark many of the stories that they give, while changing the stories as they deemed desirable. The stories are often told in the same sequence, but sometimes Matthew will relocate the story to another part of the Gospel, sometimes Luke will do that, or sometimes either one of them may change the words. Often the three Gospels will agree with one another, sometimes two of the Gospels with one another, and sometimes all three are different, depending on who changed what.

3. The Hypothetical “Q” Document

Matthew and Luke, however, have a number of stories in common between themselves that are not found in Mark. Obviously for these stories Mark was not the source. For the most part, these stories involve sayings of Jesus, for example, the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes, which are found in Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark. These stories, that are shared by Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark, come from a Gospel document that no longer survives, which scholars since the 19^th century have called “Q”. The “Q” Document is a hypothetical source, in other words, it no longer exists, and scholars have to reconstruct it, that provided Matthew and Luke with many of their traditions about Jesus, especially the sayings of Jesus. The document is called “Q” because the scholars who devised this theory in the 19^th century were German scholars, and, somewhat lacking in ingenuity, they called this special source for Matthew and Luke the “Source“, which in German is “Quelle“, and hence gave it the short designation of “Q”. So when people talk about the “Q” source, they are referring to this hypothetical source of Matthew and Luke.

4. The Special Sources “M” and “L”

For stories that Matthew and Luke have that are unique to each Gospel, scholars hypothesize additional sources. They like Matthew’s special sources “M” and Luke’s special sources “L”. And so, for example, Matthew alone tells the story of the wise men following the star to the baby Jesus; that story would have come from “M”. Luke alone tells the stories of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Both parables are found only in Luke, and they would have come from “L.”

As a result, behind our three Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in the opinion of most scholars, there were 4 sources, only one of which, Mark, we still have, the others being “Q”, “M”, and “L”.

5. Redaction Criticism

Since it appears that Matthew used Mark as one of his sources, one of the ways to study Matthew’s gospel (and Luke’s as well, when we get to it) is by seeing how it differs from its source. This is a way of studying the Gospels of Matthew and Luke which is sometimes called “redaction criticism.” Redaction criticism tries to look at how an author has redacted or edited his sources. And so, if Mark was one of the sources, we can see how Matthew has changed Mark. The idea behind redaction criticism is that if an author likes the way a story already was, he wouldn’t change it. If he has added something to it, taken something away from it, or changed its wording, then it’s because there’s something about the story he wanted to change. So by looking at the changes, you can see what the author’s vested interests were. That’s the approach we’ll take in this lecture towards the Gospel of Matthew, trying to see how Matthew differs from Mark in order to see what Matthew’s distinctive emphases were.

6. Authorship of the Gospel of Matthew

By way of background, Prof. Ehrman reminds us that this Gospel has been attributed traditionally to Matthew, the disciple of Jesus who was known to be a tax collector. We don’t actually know what the actually identity of the author was. He doesn’t appear, though, to have been an eyewitness to Jesus’ life. This book was written anonymously. There are no first-person narratives in this account. And if scholars are right to say that the author used Mark for many of his stories, it’s hard to imagine that the author himself was an eyewitness, if he had to rely on somebody else for recounting what Jesus had done. Scholars are fairly unified in thinking that, whoever the author was, he was not one of the disciples. He appears to have been a Greek-speaking Christian writing around 80-85 AD, about a half century or so after the events that he narrated.

7. Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus—the Jewish Messiah

Matthew’s Gospel provides a distinctive portrayal of Jesus. On the one hand, as you might expect, Matthew has a view that is similar to Mark. Here too as in Mark, Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, whose entire life looked forward to his death, which was necessary to bring about salvation. Matthew has many of the same stories and therefore much of the same theology as Mark, but there are different emphases in this Gospel as well. It becomes apparent at the very outset. In brief, the distinctiveness of this Gospel has to do with its stress both on the Jewishness of Jesus and on his opposition to Judaism as he found it. This Gospel emphasizes far more than Mark that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish scripture. He gathered Jewish disciples and taught them that they had to follow the Jewish law. At the same time, Jesus opposed the Jewish teachers of his own day and condemned the way that they practiced their own religion. It’s this combination of a strong affirmation of Judaism as it ought to be, and a vitriolic condemnation of Judaism as it was actually practiced, that makes Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus so distinctive.

8. The Beginning of Matthew—the Genealogy of Jesus

Matthew’s emphasis on Jesus’ own Jewishness can be seen in passages that are found in Matthew that are not found in his earlier source Mark. Prof. Ehrman stresses again this methodological point. By adding stories to his source, Matthew has altered somewhat the overarching perspective. We saw that Mark began his Gospel with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. Matthew doesn’t begin his Gospel that way. Instead, Matthew begins his Gospel with a genealogy that traces the descent of Jesus.

Genealogies are not the most favorite readings of students of the Bible. However, the genealogy in Matthew, which is only 16 verses long, doesn’t compare at all with some of the genealogies you get in the Hebrew Bible, like 1 Chronicles which begins with 9 chapters of genealogy.

The 16 verses in Matthew are well chosen and are a key to understanding Matthew’s own emphasis as comes clear at the very beginning: “the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” He begins his Gospel by stressing the intimate connection between Jesus and David and Abraham. David, of course, was the great King of the Jews who lived a thousand years before Jesus, the great King whose descendant was supposed to be another King, a ruler of the Jews, commonly known as the “son of David,” the Messiah. Abraham was the Father of the Jews, from whom all Jews trace their lineage.

In other words, the very first verse is stressing that Jesus, because he is descended from Abraham, and that he is the Messiah, descended from David. The genealogy itself goes on then to establish Jesus’ credentials as standing in the Messianic line of the Jews, and it does so in a striking way.

The genealogy begins: Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, Jacob begot Judah and his brothers, then it goes on down to Jesse begot David the King, David begot Solomon through the wife of Uriah, Solomon begot Rehoboam, etc. It goes on down to Jeconiah, who was begotten along with his brothers by Josiah at the time of captivity to Babylon. After the captivity to Babylon Jeconiah begot Shealtiel, Shealtiel begot Zerubbabel, etc., on down to Matthan, who begot Jacob, who begot Joseph, who was the husband of Mary, from whom was born Jesus, the Messiah. It’s who begot whom from Abraham to David to the captivity in Babylon down to Joseph, who is married to the woman who begot Jesus. It doesn’t say that Joseph begot Jesus.

9. Key Events in the Genealogy of Jesus according to Matthew

But then comes the most striking verse of all, verse 17. “So, all of the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations.” Those from David to the captivity in Babylon were 14 generations. And those from the captivity in Babylon to the Messiah were 14 generations.” 14 generations between the Father of the Jews, the great King of the Jews, the Babylonian captivity, and the Messiah. This genealogy seems to be showing that at every 14^th generation a significant event happened in the history of Israel: its greatest King, its greatest disaster, the Babylonian captivity, and then its Messiah. 14 generations separated all of the key events in the history of Israel; this almost sounds too good to be true, as if the Messiah had to come precisely when Jesus was born.

The problem, though, is that in order to make the sequence of 14, 14, and 14 work, Matthew had to do some creative editing. A comparison with the Hebrew Bible shows in fact that Matthew has dropped out some of the names from his genealogy. Mark 1:8 says that Asa begot Jehosephat, Jehosephat begot Joram, and Joram begot Uzziah. According to this then Uzziah was the son of Joram. But when you read the Hebrew Bible, according to 1 Chronicles, the nine chapter long genealogy, you find Joram and Uzziah again, but in that case it turns out that Joram was not Uzziah’s father, but his great-great-grandfather.

The next post will give the second part of the lecture.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

1. Introduction

In the chart below are the tools & techniques used in process 7.2 Estimating Costs. I am discussing the tools & techniques listed in red in the post today; the ones listed in gray are not covered in the post.

Estimates made by individual experts use the technique of expert judgment (tool #1), and opposed to this are group decision-making techniques (tool #10), which create estimates in a brainstorming fashion by a group. This post will contrast the four estimating techniques of analogous (tool #2), parametric (tool #3), bottom-up estimating (tool #4) , and three-point estimating (tool #5). The remaining reserve analysis technique (tool #6) is particularly useful in conjunction with three-point estimating.

2. Analogous, parametric, bottom-up, and three-point estimating

The reason why I am creating this post is because the PMBOK® Guide definitions of analogous and parametric estimating both use the words “parameters” and I thought, well, there’s a potential source of confusion right there. So I am going to compare these definitions below to help the reader distinguish between them.

Analogous and parametric estimates are examples of top-down estimates, the first being on the basis of the entire project and the second being on the basis of some sort of unit measure (dollars per square foot, hours per line of code, etc.). They both use historical data, with parametric estimates taking longer, but being more accurate than, analogous estimates.

Bottom-up estimates take more time to complete, but they also are more accurate than either analogous or parametric estimates. Three-point estimates are example of bottom-up estimates, which are obtained from analyzing individual work packages, that are refined through risk analysis. The single-point estimates are enhanced using risk analysis by figuring out how much each estimate would take in a best-case (optimistic) and worst-case basis (pessimistic).

They are even more accurate than bottom-up estimates, because they take into account the various risk factors which may effect the cost of the project. It is entirely possible that you could use all four techniques in different stages of planning, the analogous and then parametric estimates to get a preliminary estimate, and then the bottom-up estimate to get a more refined estimate, with the final estimate coming from the three-point estimates.

3. Three-point estimates

The three-point estimate relies on three different estimates:

However, they can be combined into the three-point estimate in two different ways:

The triangular distribution is simply the average or mean of the three separate estimates. The beta distribution, based on PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique), assumes a great deal of confidence that the most likely estimate cM is accurate. This allows the distribution to give 4 times more weight to cM than to either cO or cP. The way to remember the denominator of this formula is to realize that there are the equivalent of six terms rather than three in the numerator, if you consider the 4cM to be the equivalent of four terms, cM + cM + cM + cM.

After a brief interlude this weekend, I will continue next week with a summary of the last planning process, 7.3 Determine Budget, which puts together all of the other planning processes in the Cost Management knowledge area to form the project budget.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

This process develops an estimate of the monetary resources needed to complete the project. The estimate should be reviewed and refined during the course of the project.

1. Inputs

The inputs come from other knowledge areas such as scope, time, human resource, and even risk management.

2. Tools & Techniques

Many of these techniques used in the Cost Management knowledge area are similar to those used in creating the duration estimates in the Time Management knowledge areas. Some additional techniques not used in Time Management are the Cost of Quality and Vendor Bid Analysis, from the Quality and Procurements knowledge areas, respectively.

3. Outputs

The outputs are the estimates and the supporting data used to create the estimates. These outputs are then used in the next process 7.3 Determine Budget.

The tools & techniques used in this estimating process are important enough to require some posts to review them. The next post will cover those tools & techniques which are also used in Time Management, analogous estimating, parametric estimating, bottom -up estimating, and three-point estimating.

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

1. Introduction

The planning process 7.1 Plan Cost Management has as its output the Cost Management Plan. (No surprise there!) As mentioned in the last post, the purpose of the Cost Management Plan is to provide a framework for all of the processes of Cost Management, whether they are in the Planning Process Group or the Monitoring & Controlling Process Group. The purpose of this post is to discuss the elements within the plan and discuss which processes these elements relate to: 7.2 Estimate Costs, 7.3 Determine Budget, or 7.4 Control Costs.

2. Elements of the Cost Management Plan

The WBS is the framework for the cost management plan because the costs are totaled or “rolled up” from the costs for the individual work packages in the WBS.

The units of measure, level of precision, and level of accuracy all used to create consistency in the planning and monitoring & controlling of the costs. Note that the 5^th Edition PMBOK® Guide finally corrects the difference between precision and accuracy that was sometimes muddled in the 4^th Edition. Precision means whether the number of decimal places to which the estimates are specified; accuracy means the degree to which the estimate at various stages of planning is allowed to vary from the actual costs.

The control thresholds and rules of performance measurement are set up so that if variance from the budget is detected, there is an objective road map set up of what actions to take depending on how much the variance is.

No matter if there is a variance or not, the project team and the concerned stakeholders will have to be notified of the cost performance of the project, and that is what the reporting formats are for.

Finally the process descriptions of ALL cost management processes are described which would facilitate process improvement if necessary.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

This post gives an overview of the first of the three planning processes in the Cost Management Knowledge Area, namely process 7.1 Plan Cost Management, with summaries of the inputs, tools & techniques, and output of the process.

1. Inputs

As far as inputs are concerned, the most important ones are the scope baseline, because that represents the work that needs to be done, and the budget will tell you how much money is required to do it. The schedule baseline, which was the output of process 6.1 Plan Schedule Management, is necessary as an input. Other knowledge management plans may provide input as well, some of which are completed after the cost management plan in the list of planning processes. This shows that the planning process is iterative and may require several passes through in order to integrate the various knowledge area management plans.

The project charter will give the high-level summary budget, and those project approval requirements that have to do with the project cost constraints (i.e., the project may absolutely have to be done within a certain amount of money).

The main EEF or Enterprise Environmental Factor is probably going to be the project management software used to create the schedule; the main OPA or Organizational Process Asset is probably going to be the historical information on prior similar projects that can be used to help estimate the schedule.

2.  Tools & Techniques

The tools & techniques of the process are exactly parallel to those on process 6.1 Plan Schedule Management:  expert judgment, analytical techniques, and meetings.

3.  Output

The output of the process Plan Cost Management, it will be no surprise, is the Cost Management Plan itself. Essentially what this does is give a framework for of the other processes in the Cost Management knowledge area, and the next post will discuss the detailed contents of the Cost Management Plan.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

After Chapter 6, which discusses Time Management, the next knowledge area in Chapter 7 covers the last of the three major “triple constraints”, that of cost, and the purpose of this knowledge area is so that the project can be completed within the approved budget.

There are four project management processes in the Cost Management Knowledge Area. Three of these are in the Planning Process Group and one is the Monitoring & Controlling Process Group.

The first planning process, that of Plan Cost Management, creates the Cost Management Plan which is the framework for all of the other processes. (NOTE: In the 4^th Edition, this plan was created not as a separate process, but as part of the Develop Project Management Plan process in the Integration Knowledge Area.)

The second planning process creates the estimate of the costs of the individual activities which are then aggregated in the third planning process to determine the project budget, also known as the cost baseline. In the fourth process, in the Control Costs process in the Monitoring & Controlling Process Group, the actual costs of the project are measured as throughout the rest of the project as compared to this cost baseline, and changes are requested if there is a significant enough variance detected from that baseline.

The next post will go over the first of these processes, the planning process 7.1 Plan Cost Management.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

This is a summary of the fifth part of twenty-four in the course on the New Testament presented by The Teaching Company. The lectures in this course are by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His expertise is in the Greco-Roman cultural environment of early Christianity and the textual criticism of the New Testament. For those who are interested in purchasing this course and listening to the complete lectures, please go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com.

7. First Half of the Gospel—Jesus Unknown Identity

Jesus casts out demons, and people start wondering, “could this man be the Messiah?” The Jewish leaders, however, in Mark 3:22, say that the reason he is able to cast out demons is because he is empowered by the Prince of Demons, the Devil. Most striking of all, Jesus’ own disciples are explicitly said not to understand who he is. We have two accounts in this early part of the Gospel in which the narrator explicit tells us that Jesus’ disciples, who have witnessed what he has done, fail to understand who he is.

At one time, he is on a boat, a storm has come up, and he says to his disciples to beware of the leaven of the scribes and the Pharisees. They think that this means they should have brought some bread along, because Jesus has been talking about leaven. They feel that they have blown it this time because they haven’t brought any bread and he is upset with us. This is right after Jesus has two times multiplied loaves of bread for the multitudes, feeding 5,000 one time and 4,000 another time with just a few loaves of bread.

The narrative ends when the disciples think they should have brought bread along, and Jesus says “don’t you yet understand about the bread? I can provide bread.” No, apparently they don’t understand.

A couple of chapters later we have another account of the disciples explicitly been described as not understanding who this is. In Mark 8:21, Jesus has just performed another miracle, and the disciples question among themselves what this is all about. Jesus then has to ask them, “don’t you yet understand?” The answer is: no, they don’t understand. Throughout the first half of this gospel, virtually nobody understands who Jesus is.

Well, surely somebody understands, because Jesus has been doing all of these miracles. Who does know that Jesus is the authoritative Son of God? When you read the first half of this Gospel, you might be surprised at who knows about Jesus’ identity. In fact you can count the number of people who know about Jesus’ identity on one hand. The narrative begins with Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. It’s an interesting account; it’s not narrated in any great depth, but we are told that when Jesus is baptized, he comes up out of the waters, he sees that the Heavens split apart, and the spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove. A voice came from Heaven which says, “you are my beloved son; in you I am well pleased. The voice comes directly to Jesus; it doesn’t come to the crowds around Jesus, as it does in the Gospel of Matthew. So who knows that Jesus is the Son of God?

#1, God knows because he says so at the baptism.

#2, Jesus knows because he is the one who hears the voice.

#3 The demons know who Jesus is.

When Jesus casts out demons, in this account, they fly out of the bodies they have been inhabiting and they cry out, “You are the Son of God!” (Mark 3:15). Who else knows?

#4 Mark knows, because he’s writing this account.

#5 You know, because you’re reading this account.

8. Jesus’ Identity Revealed

But no one else seems to know who Jesus is in the first half of this account. All of that does change at the midpoint of the Gospel. Mark shows that progressively people begin to have some inkling of an understanding of Jesus’ identity halfway through this Gospel. At the halfway point of the Gospel comes probably the most interesting miracle story of the entire narrative. It’s an account of a man who is blind who only gradually regains his sight. Prof. Ehrman takes this account to be a symbolic expression of what will happen to Jesus’ disciples, who only gradually come to see who Jesus is.

The way the story goes is there is this man who has been born blind who was led to Jesus, and Jesus is asked to heal the man. He spits and he uses the spittle to put on the man’s eyes as a kind of salve. The man then is asked, “can you see?” He says, “I see people walking around by they look like trees.” Now, it’s not quite clear what that means, how a man who is blind from birth would know what trees walking around would look like. The point probably is that he sees in a fuzzy way, and doesn’t see clearly. And then at a second stage, Jesus looks at him intently, and the man then begins to see.

This is the only Gospel story is unable to heal somebody immediately; it takes place in stages and it takes place right after the disciples are said not to understand who Jesus is. Prof. Ehrman thinks it is a symbolic story of the stages through which people go as they come to see Jesus’ real identity. He thinks this because of what happens in the next story. Jesus is with his disciples and he asks them “who do people say that I am?” They say, “well, some say you are John the Baptist come from the dead, some say you are Elijah, some say you are another prophet.” Jesus says, “who do you say that I am?”, and Peter, the leader of the disciples, replies “you are the Messiah.” (Mark 8:29)

You would think, “well, okay, somebody finally understands.” Somebody now gives us that Jesus is the Messiah. But it’s interesting what happens next. Jesus then warns the disciples not to tell anybody. Not to tell anybody? Why would Jesus want them not to tell anybody? Is it because, for this Gospel, Jesus is not the Messiah that anyone expected him to be, that he was not the great and powerful figure who is going to overthrow his enemies?

9. Jesus as the Sufferer

Interestingly, Jesus begins to teach that he has to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die. Peter rebukes him for saying this? How can the Messiah suffer? Jesus then rebukes Peter, telling him that he doesn’t understand yet the truth about himself. For Mark, Jesus is the Messiah, but he is the Messiah who has to suffer and die even if no one else recognizes it. From this point in the narrative, Jesus regularly predicts that he needs to suffer and die. He makes three predictions of his coming passion—in this context “passion” comes from the Greek word πάσχω (pascho) meaning “to suffer” (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34).

What is striking is that after each of these predictions the disciples demonstrate their complete inability to understand what Jesus is saying. They spend their time talking about who among them is the greatest and who will be the most powerful in the coming kingdom. After each prediction, they engage in this kind of dialogue. They don’t realize that Jesus is not going to overthrow the Romans; he’s going to be crushed by them. And following him means experiencing his fate.

Mark’s Gospel has sometimes been called a “passion narrative” with a long introduction. Fully six of the 16 chapters of this book deal with the final week of Jesus ‘ life leading up to his death. After 10 chapters of teaching the multitudes, healing the sick, casting out demons, and even raising the dead, Jesus goes to Jerusalem for the Passover. He spends then a week there preaching in the Temple. He has a last meal with his disciples, after which he is betrayed by Judas, arrested by the authorities, denied by Peter, put on trial by the Jewish leaders, and then brought before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate who condemns him to die on a cross, and the climax of the narrative, the point at which everything has been driving up to this stage, Jesus’ death itself.

10. The Death of Jesus

Up to this point, no one seems to have recognized who Jesus is. And even those who, like the disciples, have some kind of partial understanding of Jesus, have not fully realized that, even though he is the Messiah, he needs to suffer and die. At the end, it seems that not even Jesus himself is so sure. Three times he prays to God to remove this fate from him, as if the Messiah could escape suffering. At the end, he is complete silent as if he is in shock. As he hangs on the cross, he has been silent for the entire proceeding. Everybody had mocked him, and at the end, hanging on the cross, he cries out, “Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?“, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, and then dies.

Even if Jesus has doubts at the end in this Gospel, though, the reader does not. Mark gives two clear indications in the very next two verses of what this death was all about (Mark 15:38-39). The first thing that happens when Jesus died, was that the curtain in the Temple is torn in half. This was the curtain that separated the area of the Temple called the Holy of Holies from everything else. The Holy of Holies was a room in the Temple which was the most holy of rooms because it was thought that was where God’s presence dwelt on Earth. No one could go into that room, except once a year when the High Priest could go into the room to perform a sacrifice for the people before God. Mark said that that curtain in the Temple was ripped in half, meaning that now God is no longer separated from his people because of Jesus’ death. The death of Jesus brings salvation; this was a death that had to happen.

Moreover, the second thing that happens is that somebody recognizes it. No one throughout this entire Gospel has realized that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, who has to suffer and die, until the end. Interestingly, it is not one of Jesus’ family members or townsfolk, not one of the Jewish leaders, and not even one of his disciples, but rather the pagan centurion who has just crucified him, who sees him die, and then calls out, “truly, this man was the Son of God.”

11. The Ending of Mark

Jesus is the Son of God in this Gospel, not despite the fact he died, but because he died on the cross. His identity is then confirmed at the end of the story. Three days later, Jesus’ women followers go to the tomb and they find it empty. There’s a man there who tells them that he has been raised from the dead. Interestingly, in keeping with the theme that Jesus was completely misunderstood all along, we’re told that that the women then flee the tomb and don’t tell anyone about it because they were afraid.

The original version of the Gospel of Mark ended there, with the women not telling anybody anything. At a later time, in the Early Middle Ages, some Christian scribes who copied the Gospel of Mark added an ending to this account, twelve verses in which Jesus actually does appear to his disciples, convincing them that he is alive. Scholars, though, are convinced that this additional ending to Mark’s Gospel was not original: the disciples never did understand, even though the reader does.

12. Conclusion

Mark was the first Gospel to be written, by a Greek-speaking Christian who had inherited a number of traditions about Jesus. This author doesn’t simply repeat these traditions to provide us with historically accurate detail about what Jesus said and did; his account is in fact much richer and more nuanced than that. Mark molded his traditions to make his point, that Jesus was an unexpected Messiah, one whose suffering and death were neither accidental nor incidental to his Messiahship. For Mark, Jesus suffered and died precisely because he was the Messiah. Moreover, Mark wants his readers to know that if they expect to follow Jesus, they too must take up their cross and follow him.

The next lecture, lecture 6 in this series, will consider the Gospel of Matthew, to see how his portrayal of Jesus is similar to and different from that of Mark’s, the shortest and earliest of our New Testament Gospels.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

This is a summary of the fifth part of twenty-four in the course on the New Testament presented by The Teaching Company. The lectures in this course are by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His expertise is in the Greco-Roman cultural environment of early Christianity and the textual criticism of the New Testament. For those who are interested in purchasing this course and listening to the complete lectures, please go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com.

1. Introduction

The Gospels represent not only genuine historical recollections of what Jesus said and did, but also stories that were modified either slightly or significantly as people told and retold the stories about Jesus. Since the Gospels have both kinds of tradition in them, both historically accurate accounts and accounts that have been changed, there are two fundamental tasks before us as we engage in our study of these texts.

First, we have the task of examining each account as a piece of literature to see what its own interpretation of Jesus was, or what its own perspective on Jesus was. Second, we have the task of getting behind the portrayal of Jesus in each of these accounts to see what Jesus was really like. Prof. Ehrman sees these as the literary and historical tasks of the historian.

2. Literary Analysis of the Gospels

We’ll begin with the literary task, devoting one lecture to each of the four canonical Gospels and a lecture to some of the gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. After looking at the various gospels individually for their individual portrayals of Jesus, then we will moved behind the accounts to see what Jesus himself actually said and did.

To engage in the literary task of studying the Gospels, it will be important for us to consider the distinctive emphases of each account. There is not just one Gospel of the New Testament but four and, as we will see, each of the four has something special to say about Jesus. Because these four differ, sometimes in minor ways and sometimes in major ways, it’s important that we take them on their own terms. If we conflate the four into one gospel, then we destroy the distinctive meaning of each one. This can be seen by looking at any interpretation of the gospels that takes two accounts that have discrepancies and mashes the two accounts together so that you have one account. Sometimes people speak of the “seven last words of the dying Jesus”, which come from taking the four different Gospel accounts in which Jesus says things while being crucified and puts them together so that he altogether says seven things. The problem with this is that each of the Gospels records a specific idea about Jesus in the things they have him say, so that when you put all four of the Gospels together the distinctiveness of each account is lost. So Prof. Ehrman wants to stress that we need to take each of the Gospels on its own terms, without appealing to other Gospels to help us explain the Gospel we are studying at any given point.

3. Gospel of Mark

We’re going to begin our story with the first Gospel to be written, the Gospel according to Mark. The Gospel of Mark is attributed in Christian tradition to a man named John Mark, the personal secretary of the apostle Peter. We don’t actually know who this author was; the attribution to Mark does not occur until 70 or 80 years after the book itself was actually written. All we know about this author is that he was a relatively high-educated, Greek-speaking Christian who was writing some 35 to 40 years after the events that he narrates. Most scholars place the writing of this book in the late 60s AD, 65 to possibly as late as 70 AD, or even a few years that. This author appears to have heard stories about Jesus that had been in circulation for some time. He then wrote down a number of these stories, not simply as he heard them but putting his own spin on who Jesus really was.

Prof. Ehrman will continue referring to this author as “Mark” simply as a matter of convenience rather than choosing some other arbitrary name. Mark begins his account of Jesus by calling his book a Gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God. The term “Gospel” comes to us in English through the Old English godspel meaning “good news”, which itself is a translation of the Greek term εὐαγγέλιον (euageelion) meaning “good news”. This is where we get the word “evangelism” from.

It is interest that Mark calls this book a Gospel rather than, say, a biography. Mark does not claim to be writing an historically accurate biography in the modern sense of the term. Instead, he claims to be writing an account of Jesus that reveals how Jesus’ life and death brings good news to those who are willing to receive it. In particular, this book was not written simply to recount the events from Jesus’ life, but to explain to the readers who Jesus really was and why his death mattered. Mark sets a tall order for himself at the very outset of the Gospel by his initial description of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God (Mark 1:1).

4. Jesus as the Christ or Messiah

These descriptions may not seem particularly problematic or surprising to us today because Christians today naturally this of Jesus as the Christ. But for people in Mark’s world, this description would have seemed rather shocking. The term “Christ” is a Greek term (Χριστός) which literally means “anointed one.” In fact, it is the exact Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word מָשִׁיחַ (Mashiaẖ), from which we get the word Messiah, so that the Greek “Christ” means the Hebrew “Messiah”. This is a designation or a title, not a name. Why would this have been a surprising or problematic designation for Jesus? Precisely because what people thought that the Christ or the Messiah was supposed to be. This would have been a shocking description of Jesus in the ancient world precisely because everyone–Mark, his readers, and even those who weren’t his readers—knew that Jesus had been crucified as criminal.

But Jews were not expecting a crucified criminal as the Messiah; quite the contrary. Most Jews weren’t expecting a Messiah, but most those Jews who were expecting a Messiah were expecting a figure of grandeur and power, a military leader like King David of old or a cosmic figure who was going to come in judgment against the forces of evil that are now in power on the Earth. Jews who expected the Messiah thought it would be a powerful figure who would overthrow God’s enemy and set up God’s kingdom on Earth. So far as we know, there were no Jews prior to Christianity who thought that the Messiah was going to be somebody who was crucified. In fact, the Messiah was not supposed to suffer and die; the Messiah was supposed to overthrow God’s enemies and so bring forth God’s kingdom. Jesus, on the other hand, was obviously crucified. How then could he be the Messiah? Mark’s book is designed to show Jesus could be the Messiah despite the fact, or rather, because of the fact that he was crucified. For Mark, Jesus was the Messiah because he suffered and died.

5. The Mark Narrative—Authoritative son of God

Mark begins his narrative through a series of stories that are meant to demonstrate Jesus’ credentials as the uniquely authoritative son of God. When you begin reading this Gospel, you are immediately struck with the authoritative character of Jesus, who is first announced by a Jewish prophet named John the Baptist as the fulfillment of the Jewish scripture. In Mark 1:2-3, John baptizes Jesus. Jesus immediately after being baptized goes off into the wilderness where he does battle with the Devil and the wild animals, and returns from the wilderness unscathed. He immediately begins his public ministry by acting in ways that reveal his great powers. The early accounts of Jesus in chapter 1 of Mark are meant precisely to show that he is a man who has God’s authority behind him. The first thing he does is to call some disciples. He walks along the sea of Galilee and he sees there two brothers, Simon and Andrew, who are fishing. He calls to them and says, “come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately, these men, who have never laid eyes on Jesus before, drop their nets and follow him. Right afterwards, Jesus sees two other brothers fishing, James and John, and again he calls to them. They leave behind their father, Zeb’edee, and they drop everything to go and follow Jesus.

Jesus calls people and they follow him without asking questions; this shows his authority. He not only is an authoritative leader, but also an authoritative teacher. In the next two verses, we are told that Jesus teaches the crowd and they amazed because he teaches as one who has authority. He not only has authority over the people that he leads, and over the people that he teaches, but he also has authority over demons and even illness. We’re told in the next stories that Jesus casts out demons, evil spirits that inhabit bodies. He has authority over them and casts them out and people are amazed because of his authority.

He then heals people who are sick, so much so that people come from all around so that there’s no room even before the door. He heals all those who are sick. These stories in chapter 1 of Mark are designed to portray Jesus as the authoritative Son of God. His commands are heeded by all, he teaches with unparalleled authority, he has power over even the demons and even over human illness.

6. Authoritative yet Unknown

You would think that with all of these miracles, people would recognized Jesus for who he is. One of the striking points of Mark’s Gospel which makes it stand in contrast with other gospels is that in this Gospel, virtually nobody recognizes Jesus despite the miracles that he performs.

Consider how people react to Jesus in this Gospel. Of course there are people who are being healed by him or who see him do miracles; surely they must know who Jesus is. But what does Mark tell us about how people understand Jesus? In fact, it’s quite striking. Virtually no one understands Jesus’ identity, especially in the first half of this Gospel.

In Mark 3:21, we’re told that his own family comes to seize him from the public eye because they think that he has gone out of his mind. In this Gospel, there is no account of Jesus being born to a virgin in Bethlehem. This Gospel starts by him being baptized by John the Baptist, so there is no account here about Mary knowing anything about Jesus before his birth. You may be thinking, “yes, she did know about it” because you are recalling the accounts of Matthew and Luke. But remember, we have to read each Gospel on its own terms. Mark’s Gospel is written to people who don’t know Matthew and Luke, because those Gospels hadn’t been written yet. If you stick to this Gospel, in this book his family thinks that he is crazy.

And it’s not just the family; we’re told in chapter 6 that people from his hometown don’t understand what he’s doing. To them, he is simply the carpenter from down the street. He’s been delivering these fantastic teachings and people come and they are amazed: who is this? This is the carpenter: how does he teach such great words? Even though he grew up with them, they don’t even know who he is. Not just his family and his townsfolk, but even the leaders of his own people don’t understand who he is.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

The outputs of the Schedule Management process 6.7 Control Schedule are as follows:

1. Work Performance Information

The most important outputs are the work performance information and schedule forecasts, which are used to a) inform the project team and stakeholders of the progress of the project, and b) indicate whether changes may be required.

The work performance information needs to be compared to those thresholds that were set up in the schedule management plan to see if they exceed those thresholds, and if so, what countermeasures or corrective actions are indicated in the plan to bring the actual performance back in line with the schedule model.

2. Schedule Forecasts

Now, even if the current work performance is acceptable, trend analysis may be used to create schedule forecasts that show that the future conditions of the project may be unacceptable. In that case, preventive actions may be indicated to bring the future performance back in line with the schedule model.

3. Change Requests

It is also possible that the actual performance is so out of line with the schedule that it is decided to re-estimate the durations of the activities of the project and thus re-do the schedule model.

In any of the these cases described in the last three paragraphs, corrective actions, preventive actions, or changes to the schedule itself, the change is formalized with a change request and is then an input to the Integration Management process 4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control.

4. Project Management Plan Updates

If the change requests changes or updates the schedule model, the schedule baseline, as part of the overall project management plan will have to be updated and the project team and stakeholders informed so that they understand that the old schedule baseline is no longer operative, and that everybody should be working off of the latest version of the schedule model.

If schedule compression techniques are used, the additional resources used in crashing activities will also have to be accounted for in the cost management plan, which is part of the overall project management plan as well.

5. Project Document Updates

Not just the project management plan, but many of the project documents such as the project schedule (the output of the schedule model) and possibly even the risk register (to add the risks involved if fast-tracking is used as a schedule compression technique) may have to be updated.

6. OPAs

If the work performance information, in the form of earned value measurements such as the schedule variance (SV) or schedule performance index (SPI), shows that the actual performance is out of the line with the schedule model, then obviously changes should be made to bring it in line, or redo the schedule, as I mentioned in the above paragraph 3 regarding Change Requests. This will involve finding out the reason or cause for the variance and addressing it. These causes for the variance should be added to the lessons learned so that the cause can be avoided, if possible, for the rest of the project. This is an example of where lessons learned can be useful not just on future projects, but on the current project as well.

This concludes my survey of the Schedule Management Knowledge Area covered in chapter 6 of the 5^th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide. The next chapter will cover another one of the “triple constraints”, that of cost in the Cost Management Knowledge Area. After posting on other topics this weekend, I will continue next week with posts on Chapter 7.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »