I NDIVIDUAL A SSIGNMENT

N UMBER O NE
“S CHEDULE AND R ESOURCES FOR A P ROJECT ”

ASSIGNMENT BACKGROUND

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.
 Programmer
Task Duration Predecessors s Designers

(Weeks) (People) (People)

1 1   3 3

2 2 1 1 1

3 1 1 1 0

4 2 1 0 1

5 2 1 2 1

6 3 2 1 1

7 7 3,6 0 2

8 2 4 1 0

9 4 5 1 0

10 6 5 0 1

11 1 7,8 2 0

12 1 9 1 1

13 3 10 1 2

14 2 11 2 0

15 3 12 0 1

16 4 13 1 1

17 3 14 0 2

18 5 16 1 0

19 4 15,18 1 1

20 2 17,19 1 1

 Project start date is determined as Monday, April 18, 2011

 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 $40/hour and D cost $60/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

YOUR CHALLENGE

1. Submit your MS Project 2010.

2. Submit your report, answers to the questions below, as an MS Word
file. 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.
5. How much money is spent for activities 1, 5, 8, 12 and 19?
6. What is the total project expenditure?
7. What are the cash flows for each of the two weeks starting on May 10
and July 19?
8. a) What are the peak usages of each of P and D, and
b) In which weeks do these peaks occur?

Marking Criteria

 All 8 questions answered correctly: 10/10

 Every error results in the loss of 1 mark; a very minor error will attract a
penalty of 0.5 marks
 A pass mark of 5/10 can be awarded if the student has lost more than 5
marks but the reason is due to the cascading effect of one error causing
a lot more errors e.g. an incorrect task sequence in the Gantt chart