Aon Network

Running Head: AON CHART ANALYSIS

AON Chart Analysis

Barbara Roberts

MGT 655

March 2012

Project planning has three primary inputs, a list of the activities that must be completed, the durations or activity completion times, and what activities must be completed before other activities can be started or the precedence relationships (Meredith & Shafer, 2010, p. 222). These inputs lead to seven important outputs of project scheduling as listed below

* Graphical representation of the entire project, showing all precedence relationships among the activities

* Time it will take to complete the project

* Identification of critical path

* Identification of critical activities

* Slack times

* Earliest and latest time each activity can be started

* Earliest and latest time each activity can be completed

(Meredith & Shafer, 2010, p. 222)

One way to graphically depict a project is with an activity-on-node (AON) diagram. An AON diagram, the most common form of network diagrams, uses boxes called nodes to represent tasks (westernsydneyinstitute); each task is given a unique name. The order of tasks and their relationships are depicted as arrows between the nodes (westernsydneyinstitute). In Exhibit 1 Task A is shown to precede Task B. Activities can also be shown to run concurrently

Exhibit 1

(westernsydneyinstitute)

as in Exhibit 2 where Task C and Task D can be performed at the same time and both precede Task E. An AON diagram has one starting node and one node depicting the project completion as shown in Exhibit 3.

Exhibit 2

(westernsydneyinstitute)

Exhibit 3

(westernsydneyinstitute)

For this problem we are given a project network diagram which gives the tasks, task durations in weeks, and precedents. This information is presented in report form in Appendix 1. This project has ten tasks labeled Task A through Task J; task durations have been translated from weeks to days to make it easier to work with within...