Recall from Example 15.1 that an insurance company is creating a LAN for one of its large offices. In that example, we provided activity durations for the 15 activities comprising the project, and we showed that with these durations, the project can be completed in 62 days. We now make some assumptions about the money and people resources that are implicit in these activity durations. First, we assume that the various activities require different technical expertise, which comes from five groups of people: engineering, systems, purchasing, installers, and training. To achieve the durations used in Example 15.1, we assume the number of people required per day for the various activities are those shown in Table 15.3. For example, to perform the needs analysis in 10 days, six engineers are required per day. Note that connecting the network is the only activity that requires two different types of people: three systems people and five installers for each of the three days this activity takes to complete. Also, note that the last activity, getting management acceptance, doesn’t show any people requirements. In reality, this activity is probably the responsibility of the project manager, who is busy throughout the entire project. (Almost all projects have a project manager.)
In addition to these people, the various activities require money. It certainly costs money to pay the people, and there are probably other costs as well. We assume the costs per day for the various activities are those shown in Table 15.4. The company wants to see how its people and money are used through time. Also, because some of the activities have some slack, the company wants to see how the resource usages are affected by adjusting the starting times of the noncritical activities.
Objective To create time series charts of the money and people usages, and to see how these are affected by the starting times of the noncritical activities.
