Question

Among the various alternate work scheduling options, which would you prefer to follow? Describe why.

Answer 1

I have always had an inclination towards the Project Management and in this regard, I acknowledge how important it is to work as per the scheduling techniques. When you start working on a project, there always needs to be a scheduling for the project to be created such that it ensures the maximum efficiency of the Project. The scheduling could be from few hours to even few years, depending upon the criticality of the Project. However, Project scheduling helps in estimating the resources and time required to achieve the same and thereby, creating a discipline to ensure the completion of the project in that time. All projects need to be completed within the given time otherwise the essence of it is lost. But in the case, where the Projects are prone to uncertainties, then certain strategies could be worked out or pre-decided in order to be still determined to achieve the same.

For example, if I were a Project manager who realizes that the project may not be able to be completed in that time that I would go for re-planning the work which is certainly required in order to ensure the feasibility of completing the project even within the time that was earlier determined. If in re-planning, it is found out that employing of additional resources could ensure the completion of the Project on time, then the same could be undertaken using various techniques. However, if there are certain activities in the process that cannot be crashed down and are critical in nature, then possibilities of delay may be inevitable. Hence as a Project manager, I would prefer a re-plan to evaluate the Project once again.

Accordingly, I may recommend a Critical Path Method. Critical Path Method technique is especially undertaken to analyze the complex issues pertaining to the Time management, by differentiating the Critical activities from that of the non-critical ones in order to in order to ensure the smooth implementation of processes. The Critical Path Method helps in determining the float i.e. the slack time in the field of the Critical path with any slip in it causing an overall delay in the whole process. I would analyze the condition on the basis of the floats in the critical path. If an activity has few floats in the Project process, on a Critical path method instead of desired zero float, then that would mean that there would be many slacks in the process that could result into delay if all such floats are on the Critical Path Method and hence in such a case, the completion schedule could not be met.. But if these floats do not fall on the Critical path but on the non-critical paths instead, then the total float on the non-critical path needs to be calculated in order to ascertain critical path drag of an activity i.e. the total amount of time that is added in the overall activity. Then, all these floats need to be added to the critical path method to ascertain the Project’s duration.

Apart from this, I could also re-plan and work upon the following:

1. Seek help from a Project Management Software which is a tool (Microsoft Project, Primavera, etc.) that can track planned vs. actual dates, report variances from the schedule baseline and forecast the effect of changes on the schedule model.
2. Conduct the resource optimization techniques to adjust the schedule due to demand (project time) and supply of resources (resource availability).
3. And the most importantly, implement the automated scheduling tools that contain the schedule model by allowing one to input the scheduling data and to monitor the schedule via the output (the project schedule).