Copyright © 2014 McGraw-Hill Higher Education. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 15 Supplement Advanced Methods for Project Scheduling McGraw-Hill/Irwin

15S–2 Learning Objectives LO15S-1 Make time and cost trade-offs in projects LO15S-2 Schedule projects using probabilistic task time estimates

Advanced Project Scheduling Techniques Crashing: adding resources to efficiently speed up a project Probabilistic Scheduling: using statistics to model uncertainty in estimating various project outcomes 15S–3 LO15S-1

Project Crashing: Steps List the crash costs for each task in the project. Choose the task or combination of tasks on the critical. path that has the lowest crash cost, and reduce that task’s duration by one period. Update the lengths of all affected paths in the network. Identify any paths that have become critical. Repeat the process until the plan meets the required deadline or until the cost of reducing the project length exceeds the benefit. 15S–4 LO15S-1

Project Crashing 15S–5 Table 15S-1 LO15S-1

Project Crashing 15S–6 Table 15S-2 LO15S-1

Probabilistic Estimates – Part I Best-case duration: task time given everything goes “as planned” Worst-case duration: task time given all possible delays are realized Most likely case duration: most probable task time. 15S–7 LO15S-2

Compute expected duration and standard deviation of each task Compute the expected duration and standard deviation for each path Use estimates to evaluate probabilities for given completion dates Probabilistic Estimates – Part II 15S–8 LO15S-2

Advanced Project Management Summary 15S–9 1.There are time-cost trade-offs 2.The probability of finishing a task or a project on time can be estimated