Project Management

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Assignment 5: Scheduling & Resource Allocation

Course: IST 614 – Project Management & Scheduling Semester: Fall 2020

Points: 100 Due: November 8, 2020, 11:59 pm.

Lecturer: Abdullah Oguz Instructions: As a project manager, you have started to plan a project that aims to remodel an appliance. You created the activities with their durations and predecessors as shown in Table 1. Table 1 – Project: Remodeling an Appliance Activity Duration (days) Predecessors A. Conduct competitive analysis 3 — B. Conduct tech capabilities assessment 5 — C. Develop focus group data 2 A, B D. Conduct telephone surveys 3 C E. Identify relevant specification improvements 5 C F. Interface with Marketing staff 1 D, E G. Develop engineering specifications 5 E H. Check and debug designs 4 F, G I. Identify critical performance levels 2 H J. Assess and modify product components 6 I K. Conduct capabilities assessment 12 J L. Identify selection criteria 3 J M. Develop RFQ 4 J N. Develop production master schedule 5 K, L, M O. Prepare product launch 3 N

Question 1 (35 points): Prepare the Activity Network manually for all the activities in “Remodeling an Appliance” project.

• You will use AON to draw the activity network, NOT “AOA.” • Each node should include the labels indicating duration, early start, early finish, late start,

late finish, and slack. • You will first implement the forward pass method to find early start and early finish times,

then the backward pass method to find late start, late finish, and slack times. • You need to work on a paper to finalize the activity network. You must draw a well-

organized activity network. You can draw it manually on a paper which does not have any lines. Paste the picture of this paper on your Microsoft Word submission. Do not submit a “pages” document.

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• You can draw the network on Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint. You should paste it on your Word submission.

• Name the Word document as “Lastname_Firstname_Assignment5.docx”. Question 2 (25 points): Type all the activities of “Remodeling an Appliance” project on a blank Microsoft Project sheet. Type all their durations and predecessors.

• Start the first two activities on December 7, 2020. • Show all critical activities on the Gantt chart. • Add a column to show all the slacks for each activity. • Show the project summary task on the first row. • Create a baseline. • Save the document as “Remodeling_v1.mpp”, and submit this document separately. • Before starting Question 3, save “Remodeling_v1.mpp” as “Remodeling_v2.mpp”.

Question 3 (40 points): You have started to identify the human resources, and assign them to the activities. First, you assigned resources to the first seven activities as shown in the Table 2. Table 2 – Human resources assigned to the activities Activity Resources A. Conduct competitive analysis PM1, PM2 B. Conduct tech capabilities assessment PM2, PM4 C. Develop focus group data PM3 D. Conduct telephone surveys PM4, MKT1

E. Identify relevant specification improvements PM2, PM3, MKT1

F. Interface with Marketing staff PM3, PM4, MKT1, MKT2 G. Develop engineering specifications PM2, ENG1, ENG2, PM3

• Work on “Remodeling_v2.mpp” for this question. • Enter all the resources in the Resource Sheet in MS Project. • All of the human resources work full-time in the activities. • You won’t write their standard rates (wage/hour). • Assign all the resources to their activities. • Show the baseline on your Gantt chart. • Identify all the resource overallocation problems. Take a screenshot of WBS and Gantt

Chart. This screenshot must show the first row “Indicators”. Paste this screenshot on your Word document.

• Solve the overallocation problem in Activities A and B by removing PM2 from “A. Conduct competitive analysis”, and add PM3 in this activity.

• For the Activities D and E, check the overallocation problem in “Resource Graph” for MKT1. Take a screenshot, and paste it on your Word document.

• Level the resources for D and E. Your resource leveling options must be as shown in Figure 1.

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Figure 1 – Resource Leveling Options

• For the new overallocation problem after you level the resources, apply “Respect Links”. • For “F. Interface with Marketing staff” and “G. Develop engineering specifications”,

identify the source of the overallocation problem. Remove the human resource which causes the problem from Activity F to solve the problem. Save “Remodeling_v2.mpp”, and submit it.

You will work on all assignments on an individual basis (not in groups). Individuals should neither seek nor receive help from friends and family in completing any of these assignments. Submission Checklist: MS Word document “Lastname_Firstname_Assignment5.docx” MS Project document “Remodeling_v1.mpp” MS Project document “Remodeling_v2.mpp”