Answer to Question #183709 in Management for manish

Question

MaxPlus Cottons is closing its Chennai manufacturing plant amidst a slow economic climate. Mahesh Kumar, Chief Operating Officer needs to be the bearer of bad news. The silver lining is that all employees will be redeployed to other plants, and there will be no job cuts. Considering the nature of the news, Mahesh has decided to use the indirect approach while writing the email. He is thinking of an effective buffer to use in the opening paragraph. What is a buffer? Explain any 5 types of buffers, illustrate with examples. 

Answer 1

A buffer is what gives project managers a leeway when unforeseen events occur and is often associated with scheduling in project management.

there are five types of buffer namely;

• Project buffer
• Feeding buffer
• Financial buffer
• Resource buffer
• Temporal buffer

Project buffer is a reserve inserted at the end of the project. Any delay in the longest path will consume some or all of the buffer, and the completion date will not change. For example, the management of MaxPlus Cottons company, adding project buffer to the expected project completion time to determine the promised date for the customers.

Feeding buffer is a buffer inserted before the first activity on the critical chain. This is to ensure that any tasks feeding into the critical may not delay the critical chain. When a delay does occur in the feeding activities, the feeding buffer is consumed so that critical chain is not affected. For example, the management of MaxPlus Cottons Company adding the feeding buffers wherever a non-critical task feeds the critical chain, and offsetting the tasks on the feeding chain by the size of the buffer.

Financial buffer is the financial wall a company build between itself and economic insecurity. For example, the management of MaxPlus Cottons Company using the money they put a side to help them during the moments of financial difficulties such as this.

Resources buffers are dummy activities with critical resource assignment, added at one or more places on the critical chain so as to ensure that the resource is available and committed to be utilized if needed. For example, the management of MaxPlus Cottons Company eliminating resource contentions by re-sequencing the tasks.

Temporal buffer is where the initial safe estimates for task duration are made by the project team members, they reflect a comfortable cushion, approximately the same as the expected task duration. Accordingly, finding the critical chain of a project begins with removing these cushions from the task duration, leaving the average duration to be used as expected task duration in the planning stage. For example, the management of MaxPlus Cottons Company determining the fifty-percent-duration estimate for each task to be handled.