Conveyor Belt Exercise - Design, Development and Documentation - Business Plan Example

Conveyor Belt Exercise s affiliation Conveyor Belt Exercise Part one The information (WBS) does not allow us to define any milestones of the project. This is because it only the WBS only represents the work identifies in the approved Project Scope Statement whose purpose is mainly to serve as an early foundation for effective schedule development and cost estimating i.e. a precursor to a detailed project estimating. The WBS is for purposes of proactive and logical plan of the project to completion, the collection of the information about work needing to be done for a project and for the organization of activities into manageable components to facilitate the achievement of project objectives. Defining milestones requires various aspects to be determines first. These include the duration of activity, activities, or a group of activities depend on. The fact that we do not know the aforementioned aspects of the project means that this information is insufficient to help in the milestones definition for the project. Part two To: From: Date: Subject: From the schedule, it is estimated that the project will be completed on 2/2/12. This basically implies that the project will take 530 days. The critical path is defined by the following activities; Architectural decisions- Hardware specifications- Hardware design- Hardware documentation- Integration first phase- Serial I/O drivers- System hard/software test- Network interface- Integrated acceptance testing. The activity with the greatest amount of slack is Utilities documentation. The activity has a slack of 115 days. The project does not seem to be very sensitive. This is because the project has only once critical path. It is worth noting that the more critical paths there exist in a project, the more sensitive the project becomes. The two sensible milestones in the project are the integration first phase and the system hard/software test. While the network diagram presents the logical sequence of tasks and identifies the dependencies between the tasks, it does not indicate the timings directly even though there could be an option of including dates in the network. The fact that the network diagram presents information in a flowchart makes it a more useful tool for communication as it is easier to understand the project and understand various aspects of the project like where the critical path exists. The network diagram may sometime employ the use of a variant in the time-phased network diagram in which the various boxes are arranged along a date scale, which is normally according to the start date. Despite the Gantt chart layout clearly showing the activities of a project’s work breakdown structure and the durations of each event and the start and end dates of each activity which makes it to be understood by a wide audience due to its simplicity and use of visuals, important to note is the fact that it fails to clearly indicate the critical path for the project in addition to the predecessors finding it difficult to visualize as the network diagram. Part 3 Part A From: Date: Subject: The resources that are over allocated are the Design, Development and Documentation. Making assumptions that the project is time-constrained and trying to resolve any over allocation problems by leveling within slack solves the design and documentation over allocated problem. However, from the Gantt chart, it is still evident that Development is still over allocated. Leveling within slack increases the sensitivity of the network. Leveling reduces the slacks leading to loss of flexibility which increases the probability of the activities delaying the project since the reduction in slack creates more critical activities and increases the number of critical paths. Making assumptions that the project is resource constrained and resolving any over allocation problems be leveling outside the slack basically implies that the project has limited resources though the time is flexible and thus leveling outside of slack solves the over allocation problem. This will however forward the end date to about 8/17/2012 meaning the length of the project increases by 145days to 675 days. In instance where there exist other projects using the same resources, then there will be a delay of the next project making it a managerial implication. Additionally, there will be a change in the critical path hence increasing the cost of the project. An example would be task 4.2 having to wait till the end of task 2.3 due to constraint in resources with a high possibility of the idle resource costing money. The available options at this point in time may include fast-tracking whereby the manager may try to rearrange the logic of the network which would realign the logic of the network to ensure critical activities are done in in a parallel manner as opposed to being completed in a sequential manner. Another option would include ensuring optimum resource allocation which will require that the manager figures out whether there could be other ways of increasing productivity while minimizing costs. Part B The fact that priority matrix indicates that the constraint is the time of the project, then the only viable solution would be addition of more resources into the critical path which will ensure the project is completed within time though it will require acceptance of additional costs. The issue of over allocation would be resolved by adding two additional development teams to the project at a cost of $70/hour. Part 4 To: From: Date: Subject: Progress Report From our estimates, it is expected that the project will cost $804,800. Attached find our resource breakdown. Resource Name Group Max. Units Std. Rate Work Cost Design R&D 200% $100.00/hr 1,160 hrs $116,000.00 Development R&D 400% $70.00/hr 6,200 hrs $434,000.00 Assembly R&D 100% $70.00/hr 2,760 hrs $193,200.00 Documentation R&D 100% $60.00/hr 1,000 hrs $60,000.00 Purchasing Procurement 100% $40.00/hr 40 hrs $1,600.00           $804,800.00 Attached also find the monthly cash flow indicating the heaviest expenses incurred during the initial startup stages of the project which was between the months of May and Aug of 2010. Part 5 1 From the statues report, it is evident that in terms of cost, the project is underperforming for the first quarter with a CPI of 0.96 while during the second quarter the costs are cut down further compared to the planned value hence giving a positive CV and a CPI of 1.014 with the third and fourth quarter being evened out in terms of costs. Overall, there is a delay of 19 days as at the end of the fourth quarter mainly resulting from the impact of changing durations and start dates of the various activities. 2 1 Architectural Decisions: on target with 25 days duration 2 Hardware Specifications: better than scheduled, the actual duration was 45 days and not 50 3 Kernel Specifications: behind schedule 5 extra days on top of the planned 20 days for completion 4 Utilities Specifications: behind schedule as it took 16 days instead of the planned 15 5 Hardware Design: better than planned as the actual duration was only 67 days instead of 70 6 Disk Drivers: worse than planned as it took 110 days instead of the planned 100 7 Memory Management: worse than planned as it took 98 days instead of the planned 90 8 Operating System Documentation: on target with 25 days duration 9 Routine Utilities: worse than planned as it took 65 days instead of the planned 60 10 Complex Utilities: worse than planned as it took 95 days instead of the planned 80 11 Utilities Documentation: worse than planned as it took 22 days instead of the planned 20 12 Hardware Documentation: better than scheduled as the actual duration was only 27 days instead of 30 13 Integration First Phase: worse than planned as it took 55 days instead of the planned 50 14 Prototypes: better than scheduled as the actual duration was only 78 days instead of 80 but it is yet to be finished 15 Serial I/O drivers: worse than planned as it took 153 days instead of the planned 130 16 System Hard/Software Test: on target with 25 days duration 17 Order Circuit Boards: on target with 5 days duration 18 Network Interface: on target with 90 days duration 19 Shell: on target with 60 days duration 20 Project Documentation: on target with 50 days duration 21 Assemble Preproduction Models: on target with 30 days duration 22 Integrated Acceptance Testing: on target with 60 days duration 4 At the end of the fourth quarter 4 is $824 000 despite some of the activities being delayed hence spilling over to the end of the following quarters. 6 The estimated date of completion 27-2-2012 7 In terms priority, the first priority being time, the project has been put on track despite incurring extra costs. Part 6 To: From: Date: Subject: It is evident that revising the activity estimates, the completion dates and durations had no impact on the total budget for the first four quarters hence any changes to the EAC which resulted to no changes in final figure. On the other hand, there will be an increase in the duration of the project to 561 days and increase in the original estimate of 530 days. Since the first priority of project was to have it completed within the estimated schedule, then this delay is not welcome. To this regard, I would suggest that there is an increase in team sizes operating on critical activities which would cut down the duration on the critical path thereby mitigating the delay as a whole. Apart from straining the budget, this will also increase extra costs though it will be the less evil one. Read More