1 (a) Your organisation HOUSE Ltd. (Housing Opportunities Utilising Social Enterprise) is a non-profit voluntary organisation established to help challenged families secure affordable housing while waiting for more permanent long-term accommodation in Ireland in the wake of recent challenges faced in social housing in Ireland. It is partly government funded but relies heavily on benefactor support and voluntary assistance in both its day to day operation and in securing public voluntary funding. You have been appointed Project Manager for securing the first round of voluntary donations that will contribute to the building of 5 Units of temporary affordable housing in north Dublin. You have identified a large number of initiatives to raise funding and have got agreement from a large pool of volunteers who offered to work full time for the duration of the funding project. Following an early planning and review meeting you have concerns in relation to the time estimates that volunteers have provided you with, so you have decided to use PERT to try and firm up on the accuracy of these estimates and have requested revised estimates from three different sources to estimate each activity duration. The revised estimates in the following chart represent the optimistic, pessimistic and most likely times you have been given for stage 1 of the project for activities A – Q. You have also determined and secured the resources needed on the project based on your own experience of voluntary projects as well as the order by which activities are to be undertaken as outlined in the chart. The project is both resource and time constrained and you have a maximum of 19 resources (workers) available to you for any single week of the project. All resources have been full cross-trained to undertake these activities. Table 1 outlines details of estimates, resources and dependencies:
As Project Manager of the Project with responsibility for informing key stake-holders in the project, you are required to complete the following:
(i) Using Programme Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) calculate in days the Time Expected (Te) for each of the activities of the project and the standard deviation and variance for each activity. Justify the use of PERT as a technique for determining such estimates.
(ii) Convert the activity times into weeks (5 working days in a week) and generate an Activity on Node (AON) diagram for the project using the early start times for activities, then analyse the network. (please round values to the nearest week).
(iii) Construct a GANTT chart and resource histogram using the early start times for each activity outlining activity durations, resource usage, dependencies and indicating the float for each activity. Comment on your findings.
(iv) Given that you have a maximum of 19 resources available at any one time on the project to complete the activities and the project is both time and resource constrained, perform Resource Levelling on the project and optimise resource allocation. Discuss the best possible solution to resourcing based on your findings.
(v) Justify the use of AON’s, GANTT Charts and Resource Levelling for this project and for projects in general.
Please Note: you are required to show your workings so please do not use automated applications such as MS Project etc.
[20 marks]
1.(b) The following chart depicts the performance at week 15 (Project Review Timeline 1 i.e. – PRT1)of a 75 week flood defence project ‘FD-001-2016 managed by a private limerick based contractor employed by the Dept. of the Environment to help protect the local community housing from flooding by the River Shannon and provide a sustainable solution in the longer term. The community in question resides along an exposed river embankment section of the river downstream of the Ardnacrusha dam near the City of Limerick.
Your organisation ‘Effective Flood Defences Ltd.’ (EFD) has been contracted as experts in managing the entire project so satisfy the needs of these stakeholders and to achieve a solution ensuring key success criteria such as time and cost are achieved. The overall budget for the project is €1.95m. The project started well but ran into some difficulties that affected its performance up to and including week 15. As a lessons-learnt exercise your General Manager Sarah Cox has asked you to report on the project performance at week 15 (PRT1) to determine how effective the first stage of execution of the project was. Following is the information (Table 2) on the major tasks involved:
Note: 1.00 on the table = 100% complete etc.
- (c) Your General Manager has found your analysis very useful in trying to pin down the project performance in Period 1 but to ensure that cost time and performance is achieved throughout the entire project and long term sustainability is ensured she would now like to know the performance of the project right through its lifecycle as the organisation is intending to undertake similar flood defence projects in the years ahead as the need arises. You have been provided with the following information for each Project Review Timeline (PRT) for the remainder of the lifecycle of the project:
(i) Using the above information calculate and plot the Earned Value (EV), Planned Value (PV) and Actual Cost (AC) throughout the entire project and analyse the progress of the project for its full lifecycle.
(ii) Using the project review timelines (PRT’s) calculate the Cost Variance (CV), Schedule Variance (SV), Cost Performance Index (CPI), Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Critical Ratio (CR) for the Project for each timeline discussing how these tools are used in project management.
(iii) Generate a Quad Plot for the entire project and discuss the use of this tool in project management.
(iv) Critically analyse and evaluate the use of the Earned Value Method (EVM) principles for monitoring and controlling performance on a typical project during its implementation phase.