Case Study 1 1 
Case Study 1
Project Management Analysis in the Internet Forecasting Industry
Group 4
Dilip Chinnaswamaiah, Ruiying Liu, Sandhya Aparna Pashikanti, Yingqi Yang, Hao Zhu
Executive Summary
In this case, our group used the techniques such as PERT, project crushing and visualization to solve the scheduling problems encountered in a development project at B&W Systems. We came up with the expected completion time and crashing solution to help the company meet the deadline. The problem was successfully solved.
Statement of the Problem
The 3 questions our group tried to answer were: How long will the development project at B&W Systems take? How to crash it to meet the 35-week deadline? What impact would there be if the estimated duration of some tasks changes?
Background
We referred to the lecture notes on network diagram and probabilistic time estimates. We also reviewed materials on project crashing. Additionally, before actually solving the problem, we transferred the information presented in Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2 of the case to an Excel spreadsheet so that we could carry out calculations easily.
Methodology
First, since all the data came from the case and was already on an Excel spreadsheet, we began by calculating the expected time, variance, expedition available and slope for each task using the formulas below.
Expected time=(optimistic+4*(most likely)+pessimistic)/6
Variance=((pessimistic-optimistic)/6)^2
Expedition available=Crash time-Expected time
Slope= Expedition available/(Crash cost-Normal cost)
Calculation results can be found in Table 1 in the Appendix.
Second, with the expected time for each task available, we plotted the network diagram for the project (as shown in the next page).
Third, we found out all the paths based on the diagram and calculated the expected time, variance, standard deviation, Z value, possibility of completion by deadline and beyond deadline using these formulas:
Expected time=sum of Expected time of all the
Project Management Analysis in the Internet Forecasting Industry
Group 4
Dilip Chinnaswamaiah, Ruiying Liu, Sandhya Aparna Pashikanti, Yingqi Yang, Hao Zhu
Executive Summary
In this case, our group used the techniques such as PERT, project crushing and visualization to solve the scheduling problems encountered in a development project at B&W Systems. We came up with the expected completion time and crashing solution to help the company meet the deadline. The problem was successfully solved.
Statement of the Problem
The 3 questions our group tried to answer were: How long will the development project at B&W Systems take? How to crash it to meet the 35-week deadline? What impact would there be if the estimated duration of some tasks changes?
Background
We referred to the lecture notes on network diagram and probabilistic time estimates. We also reviewed materials on project crashing. Additionally, before actually solving the problem, we transferred the information presented in Exhibit 1 and Exhibit 2 of the case to an Excel spreadsheet so that we could carry out calculations easily.
Methodology
First, since all the data came from the case and was already on an Excel spreadsheet, we began by calculating the expected time, variance, expedition available and slope for each task using the formulas below.
Expected time=(optimistic+4*(most likely)+pessimistic)/6
Variance=((pessimistic-optimistic)/6)^2
Expedition available=Crash time-Expected time
Slope= Expedition available/(Crash cost-Normal cost)
Calculation results can be found in Table 1 in the Appendix.
Second, with the expected time for each task available, we plotted the network diagram for the project (as shown in the next page).
Third, we found out all the paths based on the diagram and calculated the expected time, variance, standard deviation, Z value, possibility of completion by deadline and beyond deadline using these formulas:
Expected time=sum of Expected time of all the