Project Management

Unit 5 Individual Project

Introduction

Project management techniques can vary in relevance to the task at hand. But time management and identifying the critical tasks and managing the start times of certain tasks will greatly improve the probability of project completion.

Time Required to Complete Jobs

Mike was hired as a project manager to install hardwood floors for the company Awesome Floor and Tile. They will be installing new flooring into a local office building. Mike comes up with the list of work and estimates the time. A list of activities and their optimistic completion time, the most likely completion time, and the pessimistic completion time (all in days) are estimated in the table.

Activities OT MT PT

Activity 1 2 3 4

Activity 2 3 6 9

Activity 3 4 8 12

Activity 4 6 8 10

Activity 5 8 10 12

Activity 6 10 14 18

Activity 7 4 6 8

Activity 2 starts immediately after Activity 1.

Activity 3, Activity 4, and Activity 5 start concurrently after Activity 2.

Activity 6 does not start until after Activity 3, Activity 4, and Activity 5 are completed.

The carpet installation project is complete after Activity 7 is completed.

Determine and Explain Key Calculations

I would use the PERT Formula to estimate the expected time for each activity and determine the variance for each activity. The calculations are as follows:

Activity PERT Estimate Variance

1 3 days 0.111

2 6 days 1

3 8 days 1.778

4 8 days 0.444

5 10 days 0.444

6 14 days 1.778

7 6 days 0.444

Next, I would need to identify the critical path so that I can use it to determine the total project completion time. In the exercise it states that activities 1,2 6 and 7 start after completion of the previous activity. Activities 3,4 and 5 happen concurrently so to determine the critical path you need to find the longest path. Since task 5 is the longest of the concurrent activities at 10 days I would add up activities 1,2,5,6 and 7 and get 39 days for the project.

I would determine the probability of the project being