Project Schedules & Crashing

Developing schedules, activity network diagrams, and determining the critical path are important for successful projects. This assignment allows you to work through creating diagrams, identifying critical paths, determine which tasks to crash, as well as identify resource constraints.

Click here to download the Microsoft Excel template to use for this AssignmentPreview the document.

  1. Activity Network Diagram. Using the data provided in the Excel template develop an activity network diagram. Note an example is created for you in Excel that you can alter.
  2. Critical Path. Using the data provided in the Excel template, determine the critical path by doing a forward and backwards pass. Then identify the critical path and the longest duration.
  3. Project Crashing. You are considering the decision of whether or not to crash your project. After asking your operations manager to conduct an analysis, you have determined the “precrash” and “postcrash” activity durations and costs, as provided in the Excel template. Compute the per day costs for crashing each activity and determine what are the top two candidates for crashing.
  4. Resource Loading. Review the resource-loading chart provided in the Excel template. Suppose that you can commit a maximum of eight resource hours per day. What are the dates on which the project resources are overallocated? How could you reconfigure to correct the overallocation?