Lingnan University Department of Computing and Decision Sciences CDS 511: Project Management with Software Prof. Mingming Leng SEK 212 2616 8104 mmleng@ln.edu.hk Assignment 3 (Conveyor Belt Project: Part 3) Instruction to Assignment 3 General Requirements After Chapter 8 (Scheduling Resource) is nished, you are required to do Assignment 3. Note that this assignment is not easy but it is important to project management. For this assignment, you are required to Do Questions 1, 2, 4 and 5 in Part A and all questions in Part B. Finish your works with MS Project Professional 2016; For this assignment, you are required to nish three project les. The three project les are named as Assignment 3(1).mpp , Assignment 3(2).mpp and Assignment 3(3).mpp . Type your answers (to all required questions) in a Word le; The Word le is named as Solution to Assignment 3.doc . Upload your Word le and your three project les to the Moodle. Note: In Assignment 2, some students didn t properly develop a project le. Hence, I suggest that you should use my project le for Assignment 2 (uploaded to Moodle) to nish this assignment. Conveyor Belt Project: Part 3 (Part A) As announced above, you are required to upload three project les, two of which are developed for Part A. 1. The le Assignment 3(1).mpp is saved after you nish Question 2 in Part A. That is, after you level resources only within slack (for the time-constrained project), you should save the leveling result in Assignment 3(1).mpp . 2. Save your le Assignment 3(1).mpp as Assignment 3(2).mpp , click the Resource > Clear Leveling button for the second le, and use it to do Questions 4 and 5 in Part A. After you level resources not only within slack (for the resource-constrained project), you should save the leveling result in Assignment 3(2).mpp . 1 CDS 511: Project Management with Software Assignment 3 Conveyor Belt Project: Part 3 (Part B) You should save your le Assignment 3(2).mpp as Assignment 3(3).mpp , click the Resource > Clear Leveling button for the third le, and use it to do Questions 1, 2 and 3 in Part B. In Part B, you should consider the project as a time-constrained one. Note that there is a typo in this part: project duration is Feb. 1, 2012 rather than Feb. 2, 2012. In order to answer the question, you should do the following works: 1. Level the resources only within slack (for the time-constrained project); Of course, the project duration should not be delayed after this leveling, which satis es top management s require- ments. When you level the resources within slack, MS Project Professional 2007 has a pop-up window if it is impossible to solve resource problems and also promise project duration. In the pop-up window, just click Skip All , which means that you let the software do what it is able to do. 2. See whether or not one or more resources are still over-allocated; 3. If a resource is over-allocated, then you should see the Resource Graph to observe the peak demand, and directly increase the resource in the Resource Sheet table until the color becomes black. If you increase the resource to a speci c level, then you should consider (a) How many additional units should be requested from top management (b) How many additional units should be hired from the outside I would like to explain the question of how to consider the extra cost of $50 for an addition development team hired from the outside. When you consider the problem of considering extra cost, then you can follow the steps below. i. In the Resource Sheet, we should change the maximum units for Development to 400%. Since only 500% is su￠ cient, we should also add a new resource Extra Development with the maximum unit of 100%. The standard rate for the extra development should be $120 (= $70 + $50) where $50 is extra cost for the additional development team. Now we still have ve development teams including 4 internal teams and 1 external team. ii. Next, we should consider which activity should be assigned with the external team. Now we assign the internal development team to each activity that needs development team resource. Since we reduce the maximum unit of internal development team from 500% to 400%, the resource is overused. (In Resource Sheet, the color for the four internal developments is red.) Hence, we should select an activity, and change the internal development team (ini- tially assigned to the activity) to the external development team so that the peak demand for internal development team is reduced to 400%. 2 CDS 511: Project Management with Software Assignment 3 iii. In order to nd an activity for the assignment of extra development team, we should go to the Resource Usage table. In the right-hand table, we should observe which activities now use the internal development resources during the peak demand pe- riod (40hrs 500% internal development teams; this is, 5 teams8hr/team/day= 40hr/day). Then, in order to save the resource cost, we should select the activity which has the shortest duration, and for this activity replace the previous Develop- ment resource with the Extra Development . Now we still have ve development teams. The extra development team hired from the outside is more expensive. In the Gantt Chart table (entry), we assign it to the shortest activity which needs development resource. 4. For Question 3 in Part B, the sensitivity of a project is explained as follows: If the changes for the resource scheduling result in a reduction in slack of only a few non-critical activities, as a whole the changes do not increase the sensitivity of the network that much. You should consider the question: Will a very sensitive resource constrained network be avoided by adding some resources 3
