Project management - Case Study Example

Will the Huntsville plant project be ready by the end of 2009, as Janis requires? If not, will it meet the June 30, deadline set by the board of directors? What options might be open to ensure these deadlines are met if the current schedule indicates that the Huntsville plant project will not be ready in time? According to the sequence of activities that form part of the plan of execution of the project and their respective durations, the AOA diagram needs to be made in order to identify the critical path and the critical activities.

The activities can be arranged in the form of an AOA diagram as shown in the figure below: When the forward pass and backward pass is conducted on the activities, the critical paths get identified in the figure as follows: From the figure, it can be seen that activities 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 21, 24, 26, and 27 are on critical path as their total float is 0. As the total project duration is 64 weeks, Janis will easily finish the project in time provided that she starts over now that the date is 1 February, 2009 instead of the desired start date of the project that is 17 April 2009.

Janis can not finish the project by 30 June 2010 if she starts at 17 April 2009, what to talk of finishing at 30 December 2009! If Janis starts working at 17 April 2009, she will have about 58 weeks to finish the project whereas the actual project duration is 64 weeks. So the project would be late by 6 weeks. Though, if she starts working at 1 February 2009, she would have 68 weeks to finish the project, and would thus finish a month earlier than 30 June 2010. By no way can Janis finish the project by December 2009 unless she crashes the schedule.

As, determined from the CPM calculations, the total float is zero on activities 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 21, 24, 26, and 27, so Janis would have to cut short the duration of one or several of these activities if she wants to finish the project till December 2009. If she wants to start immediately when the date is 1 February 2009, she needs to reduce the duration of critical activities in such a way that the total duration is reduced by 20 weeks. On the other hand, if Janis wants to start the project by 17 April 2009, she would have to crash the schedule in such a way that the total project duration becomes 34 weeks.

Either way, critical activities would need to be adjusted since critical path is the longest path in the entire schedule. To conclude the discussion, if the sequence of project activities is kept unaltered like their respective durations, the Huntsvilles plant project will not be completed by the end of 2009, though it can completed to meet the deadline by June 30,2010 set by the board of directors provided that Janis starts the work by 1 March 2009.