Project Management

This coursework requires you to undertake some programming activity and present various completed critical path network analysis, barcharts, costings and a time/ cost optimisation. Please note that the scenario described below is wholly hypothetical! As part of an expansion project for the Edinburgh Trams, Edinburgh Council have commissioned the construction of a new Tram Operations Centre. This will be a relatively straightforward steel framed office building, 3 storeys in height. The design of the building has been completed and the land has been acquired. As Project Manager, you are responsible for planning the construction phase of the project and for overseeing it’s completion (The design phase of the project will be planned separately). At this stage, one of the planners in your team has already completed a Project Logic Evaluation for all of the tasks that have been identified for the construction of the building. This Project Logic Evaluation has now been passed to you for your attention (refer to Appendix 1). Additionally, another planner in your team has completed estimations of task durations based on the normal working practices. Unusually, the planner has adopted a PERT strategy and therefore has reported an Optimistic, Most Likely and Pessimistic duration for each of the tasks. These durations, together with the daily costs for the normal methods of operation are included in Appendix 2. The planner has also reported ‘crash’ durations which could be achieved for some of the tasks in the project if additional resources are deployed on those tasks. These ‘crash’ durations, together with the total additional costs of the resources necessary to achieve them are also reported in Appendix 2. Materials costs are not included since these are expected to remain the same regardless of how the project is executed. You are now required to perform the planning and scheduling tasks that are described below in Section 3.