CRICOS-Billing Assignment
- You have been asked to determine a rough schedule for a nine-week Billing System Conversion project, as part of your job as a consultant to a Fortune 500 firm. The firm’s old system was written in COBOL on a mainframe computer, and the maintenance costs are prohibitive. The new system will run on an off-the-shelf application. You have identified several high level activities that must be done in order to initiate, plan, execute, control and close the project. The table below shows your analysis of the project’s tasks and schedule so far.
- Complete any relationships (predecessors) between tasks. Use the following notion (FS default), SS, FF, and SF.
- Using the information in the table, draw horizontal bars to illustrate when you think each task would logically start and end. (you may copy the table to Excel and draw the duration bars properly)
- Identify one milestone that could be included under each of the process groups in the table.
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- Use the Precedence Diagramming Method (PDM) or Activity on Node (AON), to create a network diagram for the Billing System Conversion project. Assume all durations are in days. Answer the following questions:
- How many paths are on this network diagram? How long is each path?
- Which is the critical path? What is the shortest amount of time needed to complete this project?
- What does the critical path really mean? How might this information be valuable to the project manager of the Billing System Conversion project?
Case Study
Unpopular Schedule
Read the required reading for this week (McConnell, 1996), and answer the questions below.
- What reasons does McConnell give for the poor defense of project delivery estimates? What do you think?
- Outline each of the effective scheduling negotiation strategies presented. As a project manager which technique(s) would you adopt? Why?
