The Total Project Variances For The Critical Path Tasks

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.

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

Quality Associates, Inc., a consulting firm, advises its clients about sampling and statistical procedures that can be used to control their manufacturing processes. IN one particular application, a client game quality associates a sample of 800 observations taken during a time in which that client's process was operating satisfactorily. The sample standard deviation for there data was .21 ; hence, with so much data, the population standard deviation was assumed to be .21. Quality associates then suggested that random samples of size 30 be taken periodically to monitor the process on an ongoing basis. BY analyzing the new samples, the client could quickly learn whether the process was operating satisfactorily. when the process was not

The estimated project completion date is TUE 11/13/13 with duration of 127 days. After leveling and re-allocating work along the project line, the project got delayed for 3 days so that the completion day moved up to FRI 11/21/13 (total duration of 130 days). (MS Project 2007)

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

1. Activities to be crashed in order to complete the project within 30 weeks: Task F. and task D.

Project Task A slack in weeks is found by taking 33.5 weeks minus 27 weeks which equals 6.5 weeks

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.

T = 47 days, TE = 43.17 days, and the sum of the variances for the critical activities is: (0.25 + 5.44 + 0.69 + 2.25) = 8.63. z T  TE  47  43.17 8.63  3.83  1.30 2.94

Analyzing crash times and costs we see that if each activity were crashed the project could be finished in 42 weeks, however, the budget would skyrocket to $4.952 million. Therefore, the team will need to analyze the project network and its critical path to determine which individual activities can be crashed while maintaining the integrity of the budget and the duration of the project.

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).

Placing the events in a Gantt chart will help clarify and organize the events, the order in which they will occur, as well as any preceding activities that must be accomplished. Table 5 shows the project 's normal conditions, their timeframes and associated costs. As noted, normal conditions require 50 weeks to complete and therefore, cannot be used. Table 6 is a similar chart showing the project under ultimate crash conditions. As mentioned earlier, the project can be accomplished in as little as 42 weeks if every activity is crashed. This scenario is not desired however, because the project 's budget then approaches $5 million in associated costs, over 50% beyond the original allotted expenditure.

The theoretical flow time of each path is determined by adding the work contents of the activities along that path. Thus the theoretical flow time of path 1 is 100 minutes and that of path 2 is 127 minutes. Path 2 is then the critical path and the theoretical flow time for the Deluxe model is 127 minutes.

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.