Project Management and Operations Manager - Essay Example

PROJECT MANAGEMENT Project Management Question a. i. Current Designed Capa is 4500 beds. ii. Current Effective Capacity= 4500× 95%=4275 beds iii. Current Actual Output= 4500×75%=3375 beds iv. Current Utilization= 3375/4500×100%=75% v. Current Efficiency= 3375/4275×100%=78.95% vi. Future Designed Capacity=4500×(1+30%)=5850 beds Vii. Future Effective Capacity=5850×95%=5557.5 beds Viii. Future Actual Output=5850×75%=4387.5 beds ix. Future Utilization= 4387/5850×100%=75% X. Future Efficiency = 4387/5557×100%= 78.95% b. Demand management refers to a methodology for planning that is used for managing and forecasting of the demand of products and services. As a strategy used by businesses, this concept seeks to project the demand of a good or service that a company offers and then arrange the internal procedures and processes to ensure that the demand is met in a timely manner (Greasley, 2009). A lot of economic factors are usually taken into consideration to help impact on the customer demand for a specific period of time. For the case of Guys Hospital, there is a problem of supply and the demand of the bed space is high. Therefore, a demand management will be appropriate in this case so that the changes do not affect the efficiency of the hospital. With the current designed capacity of the hospital being at 4,500 beds and the current effective capacity at 4275 beds, the hospital management can ensure the number of patients admitted do not exceed its bed space (Christopher, 2008). With demand management, accurate forecasting of the level of customers’ demand is essential. For this reason, demand management will part of the resource management of the firm and as that can help in keeping the operation costs of the hospital at manageable and conducive levels (Mangan & Butcher, 2008). If Guys hospital takes into consideration its current efficiency, which is at 78.95% and the current utilization rate which is at 75%, then it is evident that it can be able to achieve more, and in terms of demand management provided it utilizes the resources efficiently. In this case, the demand management technique to be adopted by this hospital should focus on applying planning and forecasting skills in ensuring that patients are accorded the most appropriate care and in the right setting. By Guys hospital management concentrating on the outcomes of such actions such as lack of enough bed space, and making certain that the patients obtain the precise care in the correct setting, its consistency of controlling such similar conditions will increase. This will help reduce variations which might have been leading to delays. There are several demand management approaches which could be applied by Guys Hospital. These include: i. Reduction of the number of unplanned and inappropriate hospital admissions as this will enable all the hospital services to operate at optimum efficiency and ensure that all patients benefit from the services (Panneerselvam, 2012). Among such services will be providing monitored home-based health care via tele-monitoring and telemedicine. ii. Predicting the source and type of the demand through the use of analytical information tools in improving the forecasting. Access to quality information on the current demand and the hospital activities will enable modelling and prediction of the future demands. iii. Commissioning of patients’ centred primary care practices and in turn reducing inappropriate demand on the hospital services. However, it is imperative that the opinions and needs of the patients be taken into consideration when commissioning these demand management services. iv. Finally, it would be appropriate if the hospital conducted pre-operative assessments on the patients they take for surgery so as to minimize those who utilize the bed space, some of whom would have not done so. Question 2 a. A project is a task that has a definite beginning and a definite end time and consists of several activities, which must be executed for the successful completion of the project. These activities require resources among them time and financial resources. The activities must be executed in a specified sequence. The technique of project management or scheduling seeks to minimize the occurrence of any black spots such as delays and other interruptions in order to have the projects completed in time (Heizer, & Render, 2010). In this case by Guys Hospital, the following network diagram is effectively drawn from the data of project activities provided. A network is a diagrammatical presentation of the project’s operations and comprises of activities and nodes. The working of this project would entail the application of the Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). This is so because this technique accommodates risks and uncertainty in the planning and execution of the project. Therefore, it is a probabilistic model with expected duration for each activity being a random variable. The activity duration is, therefore, expected to take on different values such as the most likely time, the optimistic time, and the pessimistic time (Branch, 2009). The assumption of PERT as used in network analysis is that the activity time duration can be best described by a beta probability distribution. From the network diagram above, the critical path can be determined as: A-C-G-J-L-M. Total Float refers to the total amount of time that an activity which is scheduled, can be delayed from its early start time without necessarily delaying the finishing time for the entire project or even violating a particular schedule constraint (Bozarth & Handfield, 2008). TF = LFT – EFT For this question, the Total Floats are as calculated in the table above. b. The schedule for activity F is as follows: EST = 22nd Week LST = 37th Week EFT = 36th Week LFT = 40th Week If activity F is delayed by 6 weeks then, it will have no effect on the project completion time i.e. it will not delay the project because Activity F is not a critical activity within the critical path for this particular project (Boyer & Verma, 2010). In this regards, the Operations Manager will need not worry about anything since delaying activity F by the 6 weeks will not lead to the current critical path length being exceeded. Activities that begin from node 7 only start after both activities F and H have been completed. However, the earliest finish time for activity F is after 36th week while the latest finish time (LFT) is after 40th week. Therefore, delaying activity F by 6 weeks virtually means that its earliest finish time (EFT) becomes after the 42nd week. At this scenario, the completion time for the overall project is expected to be delayed by 2 weeks since the earliest start time (EST) for any activity that originates from node 7 must begin after the 42nd week and not after the 40th week as earlier predicted. The extra 2 weeks becomes the slack time. If this is the scenario, then the Operations Manager may have to crash the project at some point in time by performing a particular activity in a time shorter than its required activity time. This is so that the completion time may be achieved as earlier on planned (Greasley, 2009). Consequently, the duration of some activities may be reduced if some of the additional resources are employed. However, introducing such additional resources will raise the cost of performing such activities. The normal time by which an activity is required to be reduced, the greater the amount of resources that will be required to be employed. The Operations Manager must however, before crashing the project follow a stipulated guideline. This includes: i. Identify the critical activities and the critical path for such activities. ii. Crashing the durations of the critical activities only because they determine the project duration. iii. Determining the incremental cost of all the critical activities in the project. iv. If there are several activities to be crashed then, Operations Manager should only select the critical activity with the least incremental cost to be crashed first. v. Having in mind that, for each crashing step, a unit of time is the maximum amount that can be used because there is a possibility of new critical activities and critical paths from emerging. vi. Checking to be sure that the critical path being crashed is the critical path. This is so because; a reduction or increase in the activity time along the critical path may cause non-critical activities and paths to become critical, as well (Panneerselvam, 2012). vii. If a project has more than one critical path, then all critical paths must be crashed and reduced simultaneously by an equal amount. Technically, the manager cannot reduce the activity times indefinitely. However, this can be determined as the minimum crash time allowable and consequent stopping of the crashing; thus, the management’s wish has been achieved. This may also mean that all the crushable activities have reached their climax crash limits or that it is no longer efficient to go on with crashing of the projects so as to enable the organization meet the completion time for the projects. Other than crushing the activities of the project, the Operations Manager may practice resource scheduling and profiling. So far, the assumption has been that an activity can begin as soon as all the activities which must precede it have been completed. This assumption has been based on the presumption that there are sufficient resources to perform all the work as defined by the activities even if concurrently (Heizer, & Render, 2010). Further resources utilisation should be planned by the manager to ensure that it is steady or smoothened as possible. Planning of the resource requirements can only be done through the use of a time (Gantt) chart levelling of resources. This will lead to the construction of a resource profile by the Operations Manager. A resource profile is used as a calendar of all the time schedules by personnel who will be concerned in the execution of the project. Smoothing of the profiles will engage attempts to reduce the peaks and troughs in the resource allocation so that a more even usage of the hospital personnel is achieved. Smoothing will require that the manager make use of the activity floats since the completion time cannot be generally extended. Rescheduling can only be on the non-critical activities and not on the critical activities. This is because only the non-critical activities have the float times (Boyer & Verma, 2010). Bibliography BOYER K.K. AND VERMA R. (2010) Operations and Supply Chain Management: World Class Theory and Practice, South-Western learning, the UK BOZARTH, C.C. AND HANDFIELD R. B. (2008) Introduction to Operations and Supply Chain Management (2nd edn) Harlow and New Jersey, Pearson Education Ltd BRANCH A. E. (2009) Global Supply Chain Management and International Logistics: New York and London, Routledge CHRISTOPHER M. (2008) Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Strategies for Reducing Cost and Improving Service (3rd ed.) Harlow and New Jersey, Pearson Education Ltd. GREASLEY A. (2009) Operations Management (2nd edn) Chichester, John Wiley & Sons Ltd HEIZER J. H. AND RENDER B. (2010) Operations Management (10th edn) Harlow and New Jersey, Pearson Education Ltd MANGAN L. J. AND BUTCHER T. (2008) Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management: Chichester, John Wiley & Sons Ltd. PANNEERSELVAM, R. (2012). Production and operations management. Read More