Exam 5: Scheduling the Project

To manage a project successfully, the project manager need only pay close attention to tasks on the critical path.

What is a Gantt chart?

A start-to-finish linkage is the most common way of linking to successive task.

Events in a project consume no resources or time.

Define the term critical path.

A situation where two or more activities have the same starting and finishing nodes or where a single activity connects to two or more nodes is called a dummy task

An identifiable state resulting from the completion of one or more activities is called?

Verita Nist, an automobile company, sought to improve the production time and quality of its products within a year. In the first month, the company installed five new assembling machines. This reduced the production time by 15 percent. In the context of the language of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM), this decrease in the production time of Verita Nist's products is an example of a(n) _____.

Why should we only draw the Gantt chart after we have drawn the network for the project?

Consider a project network that begins with activity A and is followed by activity B. Activity A takes 6 days to finish. If the earliest start time for activity B is 6 days and the latest start time for it is 10 days, activity B has a slack of _____.

What is the standard deviation of a task with optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic times of 3, 4, and 7 days respectively assuming the estimates were made at the 99% plus level?

A disadvantage of using beta distribution to approximate activity times is that it is generally less flexible than the normal distribution.

Float refers to the amount of time a noncritical task can be delayed without causing a delay in the entire project.

Explain why the term critical path has less meaning in cases where the activity times are not known with certainty.

PERT was originally used for what type of project?

Paul, the marketing manager of a food company, created a diagram of nodes to represent the marketing process for a new product of the company. Each node represented an activity in the marketing process, and an arc joined each node. He used this diagram to demonstrate the objectives of the marketing process. In the context of the language of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM), the diagram used by Paul is known as a _____.

Contrast the traditional statistical approach to calculating the probability of completing a project by a specified time with the simulation approach.

A Gantt chart cannot depict a critical path, only a PERT/CPM chart can.

Another name for total slack is free slack.

Consider a project network that begins with activity X and is followed by activity Y. The earliest start time for activity X is 5 days and it will take 3 days to be completed. The earliest start time for activity Y is 12 days. Given this information, activity X has _____ of free slack.