Answer to Question #227141 in Management for Enam

Question

Kofi and Ama, computer consultants, are considering embarking on a joint project that will involve development of relatively small commercial software package for personal computers. The program involves scientific calculations for a specialized portion of the engineering market. Kofi and Ama have broken down the project into nine tasks and have estimated the time required for each task. The list of these tasks, the times required and the precedence relationships are given below

Task Time Required (in weeks)

1-2 3

2-3 4

2-4 2

3-5 6

4-5 5

4-6 3

5-6 7

6-7 5

7-8 8

(a) Draw the network of the project.

(b) Determine the slack/floats of each activity.

(c) As a management science student, advise Kofi and Ama on the effect of the critical path and the project completing time.

d) As a management science student, advise Kofi and Ama the effect on the project completion time if activities 2-3 and 4-6 are delayed for 3 weeks and 6 weeks respectively. Present your answer in the form of memo. 

Answer 1

b)The slack float of each activity is as follows:23- 0,34-0,42-3,56-0,55-12,63-0,67-0,75-0. The numbering starts from up to bottom.

c)Critical path is 12--23--35--56--67--78 with duration 33.

d) The critical path means that the activities of this path can lead to delay in project if any one of them gets late. The time of 33 weeks is the minimum time taken by the project to complete. If the project needs to be completed before 33 weeks, the critical activities needs to be reduced in duration. The critical activities also need to be monitored carefully as their delay may lead to project delays.

Activity 23 is on the critical path, and any delay will lead to project delay. A delay of 3 weeks will lead to delay of 3 weeks in project completion. However, activity 46 is not on critical path and has a slack time of 12, which means it can be delayed by 6 weeks without any effect on project completion.