Exam 6: Allocating Resources to the Project

William, a project manager, is trying to figure out how many hours his team can work in a period of three months. After accounting for weekends, he notes that each member of the team can work for five 8-hour days per week. After consulting his calendar, he realizes that there are three public holidays in the next three months and two employees have each requested two separate weeks off. His team consists of 15 people. Given this information, William can allocate approximately _____ of work to his team.

Explain how the commonly made assumption of known activity times can lead to unrealistic project deadlines.

What is fast-tracking a project?

A task has a normal duration of 9 days and a crash duration of 7 days. Its normal cost is $40 and its crash cost is $100. What is the crash cost per day?

The shortest duration task first rule minimizes the number of tasks that can be completed by a system in a given time period.

Pools of like resources from which labor can be added temporarily to projects tend to increase costs for the firm as a whole.

A project that must be completed by a fixed time is referred to as resource constrained.

Renly, a project manager in a construction company, has undertaken a project to construct a house. He estimates that the house will take 5 months to complete with his team of 10 workers. He also prepares a second estimate that allows the house to be completed in 2 months if 10 more workers are added to the team. Renly's second estimate is referred to as the _____.

What is the student syndrome? In what ways can it create problems for a project?

If resources were not scarce, the resource allocation problem would be concerned solely with cost minimization.