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“Planning and Managing Resources” Course Project

Part One: Flexing Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage

As you have seen, for some activities there are options for how you might choose to allocate resources to tasks over time, and there are strategies you can use to choose the best options for you. Now you will reflect on some of your past work experiences in project management in which you’ve used flexibility to achieve your goals.

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

1. Think of a project you have worked on for which you needed to use some flexibility in allocating resources to tasks for some aspect of the work. Describe what happened in that case. What did you do? How did that flexibility help you accomplish your goals?

2. Think of a past situation in which activity was further decomposed (split into multiple activities) to address person availabilities. What happened in that case? How did you break down the activity to resolve the resource constraints? (If you have not had this experience, imagine how such a case might arise within your organization. How would you try to handle it?)

The recent project I have worked was a conversion of the whole store from 4th of July event to Back to school, the store I work in is one of the big supercenters in the market so we have big assortments of the product than some stores close by so the customers are in the know where to go for season change deal, so I had to do the conversion by July 4, 2020, and for that, I had to send a team overnight who can clear out the shelves of any left-over 4th of July merchandise and price it and put it in clearance. Also, I had to change the schedule of my hourly supervisors to come early at 4:00 am so that the store can be filled with the new back to school product before the store opens at 7;00 am. Two members from an overnight team who are very knowledgeable couldn’t work the shift at night but were ok working early in the morning because of their kids and family reason. So, what I did in the situation was I had a meeting with the team about who wants to volunteer to go overnight and who wants to be in the fill team, two of my supervisors from the early shift stepped-up and volunteer to go overnight for clearing out the shelves and other two sales associates came in the morning to fill it up. It resulted in a little delay in the filling part we didn’t meet the deadline of 7:00 AM but on the bright side, we trained those two sales associates to be in the fill team.

3. Leverage that past experience now. Bearing in mind the lessons of this module, what do you think you can do differently in the future to get a better result from your scheduling and resource allocation strategies? Share your ideas.

Logical sequence of work to obtain the greatest efficiency in all project goals

Part Two: Using Critical Project Management Tools

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

Let’s reinterpret the resource demands over time for a left-justified schedule assuming you have five people available. Create a left-justified schedule for the project above, assuming five people, and answer the following questions.

1. Map the earliest start times for each activity to the resource demands over time. What are the earliest start times for each activity?

2. Level the schedule so it is consistent with resource availabilities. What is the new project duration?

3. For this project network, identify the critical sequence. (Frame your answer as Activity Node X to Activity Node Y to Activity Node Z, etc.)

Macintosh HD:Users:sherman:Desktop:CEPM502_course_project.png

4. Optional Question: Consider the project network as shown above. Think about fast-tracking in the absence of resource constraints. Suppose activities 5-8 and 8-12 can be done in parallel. At what level of parallelization is the original critical path no longer the only critical path?

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CEPM502: Planning and Managing Resources

College of Engineering, Cornell University

Part Three: Managing Creep, Scope, and the Unknown

Managing scope, the different kinds of creep, and all the things that are known unknowns and unknown unknowns are critical tasks for project managers. Now you will have a chance to plan how you will put the strategies from this module to work for you in some aspect of your current challenges. Outline your plans for improvement. What will you do differently? How do you think it will help you meet your goals?

Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.

Complete the grid below.
Key Business Problem(s) to be Addressed	What is the key scheduling or project management problem you want to work on?
Strategies	Identify which strategies from the course you plan to use to get better results.
Steps	What are the specific actions you will take to achieve your goals Be as specific as you can in outlining how you will manage some aspect of scope, creep, or the unknown.
Timeline	Identify a timeline for implementation. What will you do (or will you have your team do) in the next month? What will you have completed over the next quarter?
Measurement/Results	How are you going to measure your results or demonstrate that your efforts have had a positive impact? What will success look like in this case? Outline your measurement strategies here.