Book Report Essay

Critical path analysis identifies the most efficient and cost effective way of completing a complex project. The various activities which together will make up the project are identified, and the order of these activities are identified. Then, the duration of each activity is estimated and these factors are then arranged as a network or graph, showing the whole project from start to finish, and showing which tasks can happen at the same time. The sequence of tasks which have to be done one after another with no gaps in between is called the Critical Path.

Analyzing the critical path, there is a high level risk as it runs parallel to itself, more than one task at a particular time could delay project. Some other tasks run parallel to the critical path and have same duration; a delay in one of these tasks will change the critical path and delay the whole project.

(TCO F) Why is it important to determine the critical path of a project? What happens if activities along the path are delayed? What happens if activities along the path are accelerated?

As we saw in the earlier section the critical path activities are not delayed. But some of the tasks that are delayed are mentioned in the table below. The table below shows the free slack and the total slacks of the tasks that are delayed.

Activities A, B, and C are the starting tasks, while activities I and J are the end activities of the project. Dummy activities Start and Finish with duration 0 are added in the network diagram to make the calculation of critical paths simpler (You can remove these dummy variables if you want). Following duration for each activities are provided:

In almost every business, project management is critically important. The critical path method (CPM) will provide a timeline for the project manager for when tasks should be completed. In addition, providing a deadline and the negative effects it will have on the following successors if not completed on time. These many task are interdepended. Therefore, the CPM provides the start and finishes times of the tasks, and identifies the few tasks on the critical path that the project manager should observe to determine which task needs the most attention. Already discovering and incorporating the details the task or assignments may require, CPM calculates all task times, which can be measured in hours, days, weeks, and months. For any unintended manually input errors, a warning message will be provided. Including an automatic successor generator, task numbering comment, and data validation, makes it easier on the project manager.

Critical Path: The sequence of activities that represents the longest path through a project, which determines the shortest possible duration.

construct a network diagram for a project determine critical path and expected completion time of a project with deterministic task times (note: some of us also do calculations for probabilistic times, but not required) calculate slack times for a particular task know how to “crash” a project down to a certain completion time at the lowest cost (note: just the concept of crashing needs to be discussed and not the calculations; some of us do the calculations, others do not)

One of the main concerns during the meeting was the impact of cost and time constraints on networking techniques and project schedules. Under the ideal situation, the project start and end dates are fixed. Adding resources is not usually feasible as it increases cost. There should be a balance between time and cost constraints as it avoids wasting of resources. Also most people are willing to accept that costs could exceed expectations, and might even take a perverse delight in recounting past examples, the same is not true for time constraints. This is probably due to the fact that cost over runs are resolved in-house, while schedule issues are open and visible to the customer. A company has a lot of useful, desirable work that could be done, but has limited and finite resources available with which to do that work. Choices have to be made about which work to do and how to allocate resources. This leads to constraints especially, the time constraint and the cost constraint. Time, in project management, is analyzed down to its smallest detail. Each and every component of the project is analyzed with respect to the time required for completion. After completion of this analysis these components are broken down even further into the time required to do each task.

In field of project management, there are a plethora of mechanisms under perpetual reevaluation. One specific segmentation of project management under such scrutiny pertains to cost duration, which is the time and monetary costs of completing individual tasks within the project’s critical path (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). The process of monitoring and evaluating the time and financial impacts of each task is referred to as cost duration analysis (IBM Knowledge Center, 2016). A chief concern of cost duration analysis is identifying tasks within the project’s critical path which can reduce project duration (PMI, 2013). A common approach to reducing a project’s duration is task “crashing” (PMI, p.181). According to The Project Management Institute (2013) crashing refers to the process of methodical determining the financial value of increasing a critical path task’s resources in order to decrease project duration (p.181).

From Figure 1, we know that the critical path is Activity 1-2-5-7-10-13-15. It is because if there is any change of time in the Activities on the critical path, the whole progress time of the project will change. Therefore, we choose to crash the activities on the critical path with the lowest crash cost in order to lower the time used with minimum additional cost. Activity 7 has the lowest crash cost within the Activities on the critical path. So, we choose to crash Activity 7 first.

Managing a project is no easy task. A project is a series of tasks or jobs that are related to each other and directed toward a common goal or output. Projects usually require a significant time commitment, and tend to be handled by groups of workers. The employees at Craft Construction, a small business that deals with complete remodeling and some small commercial buildings, generally divide into groups of two or three workers per project. The number of employees assigned to a job usually depends on the size of the project. For each project, a project manager and a lead carpenter are assigned to handle most of the work. Project scheduling is different for every job. Smaller jobs require less planning because there is

CPM - Critical path method is a project management technique that uses only one-time factor per activity” PERT focus event and the nature of a job is non-repetitive versus CPM focuses on activities being repetitive in nature (How does Pert & CPM work, 2013). In the research that I have done, it like that PERT is better suited for Research and development projects, where CPM is better suited for non-research projects such as building. (How does Pert & CPM work, 2013). For Nissan, PERT would be best for random, non-repetitive activities such as tsunami and earthquakes. CPM would best suit the normal aspect of a company such as production and operation planning, allocation of supply and decision- making

The schedule of the project is estimated to consume 59 days divided into five major milestones: initiation milestone, which consumes 7 days; planning milestone, which consumes 7 days; execution milestone, which consumes 35 days; monitoring and controlling milestone, which consumes 59 days; and closing milestone, which consumes 10 days. The critical path of the project is the initiation-planning-execution-closing milestone path. The monitoring and controlling milestone is not considered as a critical set of activities as it is functioning alongside the critical path of the project development.

Having 3 days of delay in electrical can affect the whole project. Therefore, the negotiation of 15 working days would exceed up to 18 days, which could cause the penalty of $300 ($100 per extra day). In order to minimise a project’s critical path, sequencing of tasks should be changed. On the off chance that one can do a project’s tasks in alternate grouping to that initially proposed, one might have the capacity to shorten the critical path. A level of intricacy by striving for shortening the critical path, which is primarily hazardous, is unavoidably acquainted with the task. (Aydar, 2014) With a specific end goal to convey this shorter timescale, the critical path should be controlled