Essay Project Management

1- Need survey => Set product specs => Shelf life report => Secure fruit suppliers =>

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.

2. Assume that the project is time constrained and try to resolve any overallocation problems by leveling within slack. What happens?

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.

Critical chain is a modified or refined technique about critical path; it involves the deterministic and probabilistic approaches to analyze the project schedule, which is more realistic and practical than critical path.

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

Used PertMaster (Primavera Risk Analysis) and Primavera P6 to develop project and program baseline schedules. Provided schedule change analysis and Critical Path Method (CPM) analysis to find the root cause of slippages.

One way project teams add safety to duration estimates is to overestimate the time to complete individual activities. Team members may pad the activity time to ensure that they will be able to meet the promised deadline. This padding is augmented by the

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)

"A closer look at the task scheduling reveals resource leveling across tasks during competing timelines. This practice creates focus conflict, quality issues, duration drag and threatens an on-­‐time delivery of the project. During the Technical Support tasks, Document Server tasks and Shared Drive tasks, Marcel, Jackson, and Valene have primary or secondary responsibilities throughout.

With clear expectations of which activities take precedence, the Bjorn project team can then analyze the various events to determine which can be crashed and the additional costs associated with doing so. This analysis should be done prior to finalizing the project network because not all events will be crashed in order to keep costs to a minimum.

Usage and availability of resources are essential considerations when establishing Project Networks in Resource Planning. This analysis has focused on some of the risks of certain actions used to offset resource constraints, advantages/disadvantages for reducing project scope, and options/advantages/disadvantages for reducing project duration. If implemented correctly, careful consideration of the outlined risks will make managing a project a little less painless.

For example, according to Love (2002b), when project duration is compressed, the degree of parallelism increases. And there is a limit to the maximum number of activities that can be undertaken concurrently (Hoedemaker et al., 1999, cited in Love, 2002b). Beyond this limit, there is a probability of rework occurrence. Predominately this arises due by the complexities of communication of a great deal of tasks undertaken in a concurrent manner (Love et al., 2000a, cited in Love, 2002b).

The information learned from performing the critical path method, helps schedulers understand the complexity of the jobs in their project and their interrelations. From this analysis, the project manager can examine the critical path to see if there is any room for improvements. These improvements could potentially shorten a project’s duration because the critical path method focuses on the jobs that are critical and provides an easy way to determine the effects of shortening various jobs in the project

Complex building projects require the use of a more sophisticated type of schedule called the critical path method or CPM shown in Figure 13. This type of schedule indicates the dependencies and interrelationships between different activities. Those activities are shown as a network. A CPM schedule shows the sequence of each activity, the start of each activity, the dependence of that activity on the completion of a preceding activity, and how the completion of that activity will restrict the commencement of subsequent activities.