ISB-ITPM Week 7 Assignment 7.2 Debrief

Certificate Programme in Information Technology Project Management
Assignment 7.2 debrief

Case Overview
Case Overview
 B&W Systems designs and distributes a variety of management software products
through the Internet and retail outlets like Best Buy.
 The company is currently considering the development of an Internet-based
forecasting system and wishes to effectively manage the project.
 The primary objective of this case is to introduce students to the rationale and
mechanics behind project management
Case Details
Case Detail - 1
Bob Phillips, director of operations at B&W Systems, was put in charge of an important project. This assignment was
the result of a recent B&W board meeting in which Grace Johnson, the vice-president of marketing, had presented a
new product concept — Forecasto . This cloud computing forecasting system was specifically designed to meet the needs
of small- and medium-sized organizations. Johnson indicated a price point in the $200 range. Her primary concern was
timing. Specifically, once the competition found out about the product there could be several additional entrants into
this potentially lucrative market. The board meeting concluded with the chief executive officer tasking Phillips to look
into the implementation of Forecasto in a timely manner and report his findings to the board at the next meeting.
Case Detail – 2
B&W Systems designed and distributed a variety of management software products through the Internet and retail
outlets like Best Buy. The company was considering the development of an Internet-based forecasting system. This
system was designed specifically for the new start-up and small business owner. Phillips, after consulting with the
technical staff and reviewing historical efforts, had developed the task descriptions, time estimates and immediate
predecessor (IP) relations (see Exhibit 1). Phillips planned to use existing software components during the development
phase as a means of keeping project costs and the overall time frame within bounds. Nevertheless, multiple task time
estimates were formulated due, in part, to the inherent uncertainties associated with software development.
Exhibit 1
Case Detail – 3
B&W’s management team had established a 35-week completion time for this effort. A preliminary
assessment by Phillips indicated that some of the project tasks would need to be shortened to meet the management
deadline of 35 weeks. Accordingly, the project manager had prepared a set of task-crashing estimates (see Exhibit 2) .
Phillips knew that this was an important project to manage and that he would have to do a thorough analysis for the
board. He needed to estimate the completion time and budget for the project. Furthermore, he knew that he would need
to determine the probability that the project could be completed within the deadline of 35 weeks.
Exhibit 2
Case Detail – 4
Phillips knew that the board would want to know the minimum expected time in which the project
could be completed and the probability of completing the project in this time. In addition, Phillips
wanted to assess the additional costs for reducing the project time to the required 35 weeks, and
which specific tasks could be crashed to achieve this milestone. He thought that there could be
some potential issues that might cause the market assessment to take longer than expected.
Phillips wanted to investigate the impact on the crashing solution if the expected time for task B
(market assessment) was increased from seven to nine weeks. He had thought of an idea that
could decrease development time significantly. Therefore,
Phillips also wanted to see the impact on the crashing solution if the expected time for task
D(development) was decreased to seven weeks. The management team would certainly want to
see the crashing cost function at the next board meeting, so Phillips had to produce that as well.
He was curious to discover whet her or not the crash cost curve was non-linear.
Phillips had taken a course on project management in business school. He was eager to use
some of the techniques he had learned, such as the Program Evaluation and Review Technique
(PERT), project crashing and linear programming, to do the analysis on this project. He only had
one week to complete the analysis, thus he was eager to get started.
Solution
Solution
 What is the estimated completion time for this project?
Basic Network Diagram

Solution
 What is the estimated completion time for this project?
The activity-on-node (AON) network in Exhibit TN-1 can be constructed from the information contained in Exhibit 1 of
the case.
The expected time for each task is computed using the formula:
(1) Expected time = (Most optimistic time + 4 * Most likely time + Most pessimistic time) / 6.
The variance for each task is computed using the formula:
(2) Variance = (Most pessimistic time – Most optimistic time)2 / 36.
A forward pass and backward pass through the AON network in Exhibit TN-1 must be performed to
determine the earliest start, earliest finish, latest start and latest finish times of each task.
(3) Slack = Latest start time – Earliest start time or Latest finish time – Earliest finish time
Solution
 What is the probability that the project could be completed within the deadline of 35 weeks (normal
conditions)?
To determine the probability that the project can be completed in 35 weeks, we need to know the variance
of the project. The variance of the project is the sum of the variances of the activities that are on the
critical path, and the critical path includes the activities which have zero slack
The NORMDIST formula in Excel should be used to compute the probability that the project can be
completed in 35 weeks. The NORMDIST formula in the context of project management has four
parameters :
Parameter 1 – The deadline, in this case 35 weeks.
Parameter 2 – The expected completion time for the project (from Question 1)
Parameter 3 – The standard deviation of the project: this is the square root of the variance of the project
Parameter 4 – The value for this is 1, which will give a cumulative probability
Thank You
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Certificate Programme in Information Technology Project Management

Assignment 7.2 debrief

Basic Network Diagram

The variance for each task is computed using the formula:

(2) Variance = (Most pessimistic time – Most optimistic time)2 / 36.

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