For this course you will need Microsoft Office Project Professional 2013 or 2016. ABC Development Company has won a contract to design, build and implement an information system for a large Australian...

  For this course you will need Microsoft Office Project Professional 2013 or 2016.




ABC Development Company has won a contract to design, build and implement an information system for a large Australian company.  The Project Manager has two types of resources, Programmers and Designers, to be used in this project.  The following table lists the project tasks, their duration in weeks, precedence relationships, durations and resource requirements.

•    Project start date is determined as Monday, April 10, 2017

•    Schedule the project from the project start date

•    Select the standard calendar template of 8 hours/day, 40 hours/week and 20 days/month

•    Do not worry about public holidays, assume that everyone works as usual (it’s the new workplace enterprise agreement!)

•    There are 8 units (people) of Programmers (P) and 7 units of Designers (D) available

•    P cost $80/hour and D cost $120/hour

•    Precedence linking dependent tasks is the usual finish-to-start

•    All activities are of fixed duration and to be scheduled as soon as practicable. Do not split tasks to reduce resources.


YOUR CHALLENGE


1.    Submit your MS Project 2013 or 2016 file using your student number as the file name through the iLearn (class web site) assignment

submission tool.

See the class web site at:  https://ilearn.mq.edu.au/

2.    Submit your report, answers to the questions below, as a pdf file.  Make sure that you include your name and student number on the front page.  Again, use your student number as the file name.

3.    Late submissions will attract the usual 10% penalty per day.  iLearn time stamps all the submissions.  You can submit multiple times up to the deadline without penalty.


Answer the following questions in your report:


1.    Provide a table outlining how you allocated the Resources (P1 to P8 and D1 to D7) across the Tasks.  What is the minimum number of each resource necessary to ensure that the project is not delayed due to over allocation of resources?

2.    From the Network Diagram, note the critical path in red, and list the tasks in order on the critical path.  Include a copy of the Network Diagram in your report.

3.    What is the finish date for the project?

4.    Use the Tracking Gantt Chart to investigate the non-critical activities.  The Tracking Gantt groups them and shows the slack time as a blue line at the end of a dependent series.  List each of these activities that have a slack time, and indicate the slack time.  This is the Free Slack Time.  We are not interested in the Total Slack which attributes downstream slack to upstream tasks and can be very deceptive.

5.    How much money is spent for each of the activities 1, 5, 8, 12 and 19?

6.    What is the total project expenditure?

7.    What are the cash flows for each of the one week starting on May 1 and July 10, 2017?
8.    a) What are the peak usages of each of P and D, and b)  In which weeks do these peaks occur? We want to know the maximum resources needed for each of P and D, and the exact weeks for each peak usage so that it can be correctly scheduled.