Mp586 Week 3 Essay

Essay Question #1: Will the Huntsville Plant Project be ready by the June 30, 2012 deadline set by the board of directors? What options might be open to ensure this deadline is met, if the current schedule indicates the Huntsville plant project will not be ready in time? – As per the work breakdown structure created in MS Project with start date as 4/17/11, the end date for the project is 7/6/12, i.e. July 6th 2011, and hence delayed by about 6 days from deadline of June 30th that is set by the board of directors. Given this scenario, there can be multiple options that can be pursued by the project manager to reduce the duration of the project as discussed below. The duration of the project can be reduced only if the duration of the tasks on the critical task are reduced, thus making the critical path shorter. Some of the techniques that can be used for making the critical path shorter

Assigning more resources to a task on critical path – The project manager should identify tasks that are on the critical path and then assign more resources to these tasks, thus ‘crashing them’ in terms of duration to bring down the total duration of the project, thus ensuring that the project gets completed before the desired project deadline (Solberg, A., n.d). However the project manager must ensure that the resources that are added to perform the parallel tasks know what is expected out of them and that they are skilled and equipped to perform these tasks, so that objectives of the project are not impacted.

Performing tasks in parallel – There are some tasks that are very long in duration, such as the building construction (40 weeks), procurement of equipment (24 weeks) which have a lot of impact on making the critical path exceed the required deadline. These tasks should be analyzed and broken down into independent modules which can be performed in parallel, thus reducing the overall time to perform these tasks and bringing down the duration for completing these tasks...