Exam 11: Critical Chain Project Scheduling

All five members of a project team add 20% to their individual serial activities as a safety margin and submit their time estimates to the project manager.The manager adds the activity length estimates together and adds 20% for his personal safety margin.Then,anticipating a cut by top management,he adds another 20% to his final project estimate.Much to his surprise,top management cuts only 10% off his time estimate.How much of a cushion is now built into the project?

A project is represented by the activity durations (in days,estimated at 90% likelihood of completion)and precedence requirements shown in the table.What is the length of a feeder buffer if this project is managed using critical chain methodology?

A(n)________ refers to a safety margin that is applied to a project immediately before the use of the constrained resource to ensure that the resource will not be starved for work.

The ________ syndrome describes the tendency to procrastinate before starting a project with a due date well into the future.

A worker is assigned three tasks,A,B,and C,each having a duration of 10 days.One approach to completing these tasks would be to focus on one at a time,complete it,and then move to the second,followed by the third.One multitasking approach would call for dividing each task in half and rotating from one to the other so that the first halves of A,B,and C are completed before the second halves of A,B,and C are completed (always in this order).What is the difference in the average completion times for the multitasked activities when compared to the one at a time approach?

A project is represented by the activity durations (in days,estimated at 90% likelihood of completion)and precedence requirements shown in the table.How many feeder buffers are needed if this project is managed using critical chain methodology?

Which of the following statement is best?

Drum buffers are:

Which of these is Parkinson's Law?

An important departure from traditional project management is that critical chain project management logic:

A project is represented by the activity durations (estimated at 90% likelihood of completion)and precedence requirements shown in the table.What is the length of the feeder buffer for path NQT if this project is managed using critical chain methodology?

Use the project information in the table to resolve resource conflicts,identify the critical chain and critical path,and create feeder buffers.The project buffer follows:

The critical chain is usually the same as the critical path.

The legal department is needed to review all contracts a project organization enters.The legal department is continually swamped with work and all other departments find themselves waiting on legal before they can begin their work.Legal is the drum for this organization.

Your next project consists of 10 consecutive 8-day activities,each estimated by a different worker in your organization.Note that the estimators have not yet added any buffer to the 8-day figure.Your organizational culture dictates that you add your own safety margin of 30% into your estimates.The new project manager has just completed an excellent course in project management offered at the local university.When the first project meeting begins,he dazzles you with his wit and sophistication.You are considerably less charmed when he reveals that he has an exciting new technique for managing projects.He adheres to critical chain project management ideas and plans to create an overall project safety buffer after trimming the safety buffers from each of the 10 activities.How much closer has the project deadline moved?

If a project activity experiences negative variation:

Define and describe the function and interrelationship of a drum,drum buffer,and a capacity constraint buffer in CCPM.

CCPM advocates performing all non-critical activities:

A project consists of six consecutive tasks that have average duration and worst-case duration estimates (in weeks)as shown in the table.Use Newbold's method to determine the aggregated two sigma buffer for this project.

A project is represented by the activity durations (in days,estimated at 90% likelihood of completion)and precedence requirements shown in the table.What is the length of a feeder buffer if this project is managed using critical chain methodology?