PERT Assignment

PERT—Assignment

By Bob Hugg

As the City Planner of a mid-sized city it is your responsibility to conduct research at the request of the City Manager and the City Council. It is an election year and a City Council member is concerned that traffic may be a problem at “one or more” intersections. At the Council member’s insistence, the City Manager has directed you to study the traffic at the city intersections and identify the highest risk intersection. There are many other projects in progress and resources are limited, but the Council Member would like the answer sooner rather than later, preferably with substantial lead-time before the November election.

There are many intersections in your city, so this will be an involved and time consuming project. You have three resources within your section that you can dedicate to this project (100% of their effort). They are Ben, a new and young, but eager, assistant planner; Jessica, an experienced planner with five years experience; and Adam, a very experienced senior planner with fifteen years experience. You will need to assign tasks that the individual people are capable of performing while considering the difference in their salaries (budget is always a consideration). You are concerned that you will not be able to get the project done fast enough for the Council member’s liking, but working overtime is not an option since this project falls well outside the Union guidelines for overtime situations. Your employees may not work more than 100% of a normal workday (no overtime at all).

In the case of a true emergency (when you need to crash the project) you have been given permission to borrow two employees from other parts of the City Staff. The City engineer has an employee, Debbie, who can be made available, but only for short amounts of time and not more than 50% of her work day. The Statistics and Reporting Division also has an employee, Sarah, who is happy to help but she can also spend not more than 50% of her workday on this project. Both of these people can only be used on this project if it needs to be crashed. A word of caution: these are both highly experienced employees and their participation carries a significant price tag. Additionally, while Debbie is well versed in planning issues and methods, Sarah is a statistician and knows little about traffic control or traffic flow – assign them to tasks where they can be effective if you assign them at all.

You decide you need to build a project plan that reflects a scenario using only your own people as well as a plan that is crashed (in case the Council member demands an answer earlier) that includes limited use of the “emergency employees”. This will involve setting up a resource sheet, task list, setting dependencies, doing a PERT analysis, preparing Gantt charts and Network Diagrams, identifying critical tasks and the critical path and more – everything necessary to set up a professional project plan. Fortunately, you have just finished a seminar on MS Project and you feel up to the task. You will also need to do a PERT Risk Analysis that determines the probability of the project being completed on the date you determine, the date using only your employees (before the project is crashed). You may also wish to determine the probability of the project being accomplished a week or so earlier and a week or so later. When all is said and done, write a memo that discusses the project, the expected completion time (with probability), costs, and any other pertinent information. Make a recommendation, essentially laying out the case for launching the project – on reading it the City Manager will determine if the project should go forward. Be sure to mention the costs and impacts if the project is crashed – perhaps the City Manager will decide the project is either not pressing enough to do “ASAP” or will feel it is too expense and abandon the idea altogether. Your memo will not only help her decide, by quantifying the project you will give her leverage with the Council member and other elected officials (it is difficult to argue with cold hard facts – perhaps the time/money/effort can be used more wisely elsewhere).

You have done your homework – you’ve compiled a list of tasks and estimates and you have also identified the relationships between tasks, so you are ready to build a plan. You take another look at your list of tasks and resources and, with a power lunch of diet coke and Oreo cookies in front of you, you are ready to begin.

NOTE: There is no single “correct” plan for this assignment – there are many correct plans. A “correct” plan will reflect the data and give a sense of reasonable costs, reasonable impacts and reasonable probabilities of success. A correct plan will also reflect the difference between a plan in its original state and after it has been crashed. You must crash at least 1 task but only crash enough tasks to yield a significant result (crashing = more $$, another consideration). Because there are as many variations in plans as there are Project Managers, ultimately, the success of this assignment will depend on the articulate nature of the memo written. The goal of this assignment is to demonstrate the ability to craft a logical and workable plan and interpret and communicate the results. You may add attachments to your memo to whatever degree you feel they add value to your position and recommendations.

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