Chapter 9: Project Management Answers – Flashcards
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projects
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unique nonroutine activities intended to accomplish some objective within a limited amount of time ex: building construction, movie production
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project management
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planning, scheduling and controlling
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project management parts
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project team matrix organization project manager scope statement statement of work work breakdown structure (WBS)
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project team
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made up of individuals from various areas and departments within a company (group from editing, casting, directors)
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matrix organization
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a team structure with members from functional areas, depending on skills required (select people from project teams)
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project manager
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most important member to a project team
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scope statement
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a document that provides an understanding, justification, and expected result of a project
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statement of work
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written description of objectives of a project
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work breakdown structure
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breaks a project into components, subcomponents, activities and tasks
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project scheduling
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based off of a gantt chart allows us to see how things work and operations overlap
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Early Start
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absolute earliest an activity can start equal to latest early finish times
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early finish
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absolute earliest any activity can be finished given the order of the overall project
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late start
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absolute latest any activity can begin without delaying the overall project
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late finish
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absolute latest any activity can be finished without slowing down the project
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critical path
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the absolute longest path for completion of the project (with a given time) having no slack
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Start and finish time rules
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to determine the critical path we will analyze the program diagram twice using: forward pass - early start early finish backwards pass - late start and late finish
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early start rules
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if an activity has one immediate predecessor, its ES is on the EF of its predecessor if has several, its ES is the max
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Early finish time rules
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the early finish time of an activity is the sum of its ES time and its activity time
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late finish time rule
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if an activity is an immediate predecessor, its LF equals the LS of the immediately following activity if an activity is an immediate predecessor for several activities, its LF equals the minimum of all LS values of the activities that immediately follow
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late start time rule
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if the LS time of an activity is the difference of it LF time and its activity time
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slack
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allowable slippage for any path LS-ES or LF-EF
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for activities on the critical path (slack)
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delaying these activities will delay the entire project
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move through the activity node chart in
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vertical slices
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crashing a project
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sometimes projects need to be sped up in order to meet a specified date possibly because the project is behind schedule or a date has been changes
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we generally crash projects on the critical path on the following guidelines
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amt by which an activity can be crashes is allowed taken together, the shortened activity durations will allow us to finish the project by the due date total cost of crashing is as small as possible
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crashing costs tend to increase
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as project duration decreases meaning generally more expensive to crash projects that are already pretty short indirect costs increase as project time does we should aim to reduce the projects length so long as crashing costs are less than indirect costs
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CPM, critical path management
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assumes that activity times are fixed with no variation if activity times vary, we use PERT analysis
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time estimates for pert analysis
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optimistic time pessimistic time most likely time
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optimistic time (a)
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shortest time activity should take if all goes according to plan
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pessimistic time (b)
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longest time activity should take place if shit hits the fan
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most likely time (m)
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most realistic estimate of activity time
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estimates of our activity times are assumed to follow
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a beta distribution
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using beta distribution
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we can calculate mean and variance of INDIVIDUAL activity times
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in beta distribution
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we are only concerned with the expected times and variances on the critical path
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we assume that the distribution of project times follows a
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normal distribution so we can use z scores and the standard normal table to compute possibilities
