Project Resources and Cost Assignment

Question 2: Project Duration 

From the network plan, critical activities encompass all the events that are in the path that takes the longest period to completion. For instance, the activities in the upper path of the network take 12 hours, which is 11 hours more than the time taken by the lower path. Therefore, it can be inferred that critical activities are the activities in resources C, C, E, and c implying the project duration of 12-time units.

Question 5 

The scheduling has been pivotal in reducing the risk of lateness. The process has led to a new start, finish, and the slack time leading to a significant change in the project duration ( Larson, & Gray, 2011) . To be precise, the slack time in ID1 and ID 4 has been reduced to zero since the resources are used in ID2 and ID 5 respectively. Also, the slack value in ID4 has reduced to 2 from 3 as the resources were consumed in program 4. Furthermore, the time required to finish the project of 18 units of time has been reduced to 12 units of time. The reduction is a result of the availability of only three programs to meet the resources constraints and increasing critical activities by two. The schedule slack of 1 is from 1 to 2, for 3 is 5 to 7 and the slack schedule for 4 is 6 to 7. From the above results, the critical activities, therefore, become 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 7.

Question 6 

With no splitting of activities, the only option is to reject the broker’s request because of the resources deficit experienced in period zero. Splitting tasks is a technique used to increase resource utilization (Gido, Clements, & Clements, 2014). Therefore, with scenarios of resource deficits, the only remedy is splitting of tasks. This means that the rejection of the broker's request is imminent even though there are two months left.

References

Gido, J., Clements, J., & Clements, J. (2014).  Successful project management . Nelson Education.

Larson, E. W., & Gray, C. F. (2011). Project management: The managerial process.