Business Analysis Techniques Assignment

1. Sid Davidson, a personnel director, is considering a leadership training program for the middle-level managers in his company. Sid has listed a number of activities that must be completed before a training program of this nature could be conducted. The network for the problem and the activity times are below.

(a)  Find the ES, EF, LS, and LF of each activity, and type them into the appropriate locations in the network. Two values have been inserted for you as check figures.

(b)  Find the finish time for the project, and find the critical path.

(c)   Find the slack times for the activities that are not on the critical path.

2. Time estimates for a project are given below.

(a)  Find the expected activity times and the variances of activity completion times, and insert them into the table.

(b)  Suppose that the critical path of this project turns out to be A-C-E-F. Find the project variance and the project standard deviation.  [Check figure: standard deviation is 2.66. You must show work to get credit for this answer.]

(c)   Given an expected completion time of 32.5 days, and the standard deviation of 2.66 found in the previous question, find the probability that the project will be completed within 34 days. Hint: After finding the z-score, there is one more step to find the probability.

3. The Scott Corey accounting firm is installing a new computer system, and several things must be done to make sure the system works properly. The following table provides information about this project.

(a)  Find and fill in the crash cost per week.

(b)  The critical path for this project is A-E-G-H and the completion time is 17 weeks. The managing partner of the accounting firm has decided that the system must be up and running in 16 weeks. Which activity should be crashed, and what is the total cost of crashing?  (Assume that A-E-G-H remains the critical path after crashing)