Project Management : Resource Scheduling

Remember the old saying, "A project plan is not a schedule until resources are committed." This exercise illustrates this subtle, but very important, difference.

4. What is your opinion on the potential for the project to be completed on time?

(b) Which activities should be crashed to meet a project deadline of 12 days at minimum cost?

A) The weekly budget is formed by only using the early start times of each activity.

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.

2. Construct a table containing the project activities using the letter assigned to each activity, the time estimates, and the precedence relationships from which you will assemble the network diagram.

1.2 Identify the tasks and resources required for the activity, including any operational constraints that apply

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.

Before deciding which activities should be crashed, Bjorn and his team first need to have a clear understanding of the project's priorities. To do this the team has first defined the project's scope and decided to develop a project priority matrix.

Initial projections show that the current schedule will take 50 weeks to finish with a final budget estimate of $3.152 million. Although the project estimate comes in under budget, the time frame for completion extends beyond the acceptable 45 weeks. Before deciding which activities should be crashed, Bjorn and his team first need to have a clear understanding of the project’s priorities. To do this the team has first defined the project’s scope and decided to develop a project priority matrix. Defining the project scope sets the stage for developing a plan and its primary purpose is to define as clearly as possible the deliverables and to focus project plans (Gray & Larson, 2005).

In order to meet the accelerating deadline which is 60 hours earlier at minimum additional cost, we should first look at the network diagram and the critical path.

Project scheduling can be performed in many ways. Some of the more common and popular methods of project scheduling are network analysis and the critical path method of scheduling (CPM). Although companies do not always use these methods in there exact form, most do tend to use a modified version of one or both of these methods. I discovered that Craft does not use network analysis or CPM, but they do have a scheduling method that works for them and is quite similar to CPM.

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