Question 1 .

Describe the “ideal” project progress and the “usual” progress. Discuss the difference between the two and what drives a project towards the usual progress as opposed to the ideal. Illustrate with an example from your own experience, where possible.

Question 2.

Describe the intent of following a lifecycle approach to project management and its benefits.

Question One

Hotbed Limited is trying to decide whether to sell up and build a new factory at a new site or rebuild its current facility. It has evaluated some of the costs and probabilities of its options, as well as some of the ‘what-if’ scenarios. It now wants to prepare a decision tree to assist with its decision making.

Prepare a decision tree to clarify the issues and present a recommendation.

Question Two

You are redesigning the company structure of an old established construction company to meet a growing need for project-based business. The business has to manage projects via project managers and teams allocated to each project. The business also has architects and structural engineers; purchasing staff for buying materials; pools of labour with specific skills such as brick laying, plumbing, etc.; and business development, sales/marketing, and finance departments. The company also has access to a large supply of subcontractors such as painters and electrical technicians.

Propose an efficient company structure that will be responsive to new growing demand for projects and discuss why you have chosen this structure.

Earlier this week, we had a group exercise where you asked questions in order to define the requirements for a charity project. Your final is based on the case and those requirements. Some of the objectives were:

• Contact to the right people need help.

• Plan for charity event within the budget

• Prepare logistics • Organize 1-day event to attract more than 100 people.

Assume that you have been hired for this project. Please answer these questions:

• Based on the case and the results of the requirement gathering, list at least 10 main activities for this project in an activity precedence diagram. Make sure that your activities will meet the objectives. When you finish, you will have at least 3 paths (one critical path and at least 2 non-critical paths).

• Provide an activity duration table that includes optimistic, likely, pessimistic, and estimated time (TE). Be sure to include the formula you used to calculate TE. You will have to come up with your own 'likely' duration estimate.

• From that activity duration table, draw a project activity network (using AON) with task durations.

• Provide the path and duration for all paths. Indicate which one is the critical path. • Add forward pass and backward pass to your activity duration table

• How much slack is available in the noncritical paths?

• Name at least 3 potential risks for this project. What can you do to mitigate those risks?