Project Management: Cpm & Gantt

Q1) Discuss the benefits to Balfour Beatty of using critical path analysis in order to plan its construction projects. (15 marks)

1. What is the estimated project completion date? (Assume there are no holidays and ignore the sunk cost of the planning team’s effort)

Describe common practices to estimate the duration of project activities as well as real reasons that cause project delays.

(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?

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.

Measurable – All tasks will be listed, allocated and assigned to the most appropriate person within the Quality department. Expected completion dates will be set, weekly progress meeting held to monitor the project and the associated tasks. The goal is to complete all the tasks by the 31 January 2013.

The completed deck is the main deliverable from this project. Other deliverables include the clean-up of the construction area and the landscaping work to the backyard.

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

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).

Planning, Scheduling and Controlling are three important functions of management. Planning involves the formulation of objectives and goals that are subsequently translated into

5. What is the next step the team members must take in order to complete their project plans?

We will submit weekly milestone reports directly to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). The milestone repost for the project will base on information in the Gantt chart. An agenda for the project team meeting will develop to work through some of the challenges while facing in executing the project. Update the scope of the project while having some changes in the executing phase. We will develop detailed lists of assumptions and questions that all the project team has related to the new scope of the project.

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

The project team must comply with their project managers (and the timeline) or else there can be delays leading to the issues mentioned above.

It will also detail what milestones must be met to be able to successfully coordinate effort within the project timeline and meet the inauguration date as planned, without the milling of any other milestones nor the compromising of any nor all deliverables. Finally, it ensures the appropriate risk mitigation is in place to meet the final deliverables and the timeline requirements within every project phase.