CPM/PERT for Project Management

This video discusses about the important considerations in identifying activities in a project and applies them in a project that has quite a few parallel activities.

Activities in a project are mutually related. Some may be started only after some other activities are completed. Whereas, some may be done in parallel even when some other activities of the project are on. This video takes the project of previous lecture and establishes the relationships between the activities.

We start drawing an activity on arrow network diagram in this video.

This video completes drawing of network diagram of the previous video. It demonstrates use of dummy activity in handling complex interrelationships among activities.

This note summarizes the concept of drawing activity network diagram.

There are 4 questions to revise the basics.

In an Activity on Arrow (AOA) network diagram, activities are represented by arrows drawn between nodes. Nodes represent end or start of one or more activities. Hence they represent events indicating start or end of activities. Earliest time of an event is such time before which this event cannot happen. This is because of the dependencies of activities ending at this event on other activities in the project. This video computes earliest time of events in the project for which network diagram has already been drawn in earlier videos.

Earliest time of the node representing end of the project gives the project completion time. The project cannot be completed before that without reducing activity times. In deterministic situation, the project is planned to be completed in the earliest possible time only. Latest time of various events are such time before which the event must happen to avoid delay in project completion. The earliest time and the latest time for some events differ. This knowledge helps project managers in correctly prioritizing the activities.

This video computes the latest time of all the events in this project.

Sometimes project needs to be completed before the scheduled time due to reasons like making use of some unforeseen opportunity or to accommodate some requirement or something like this. Resources can be deployed on various activities to reduce the activity time. This  video brings some important point related to change in critical path to help managers deploy the resources to get best result.

It is an interesting case that involves resource planning, prioritizing of activities and resource allocation. It also involves change in critical path due to resource allocation. This case is quite helpful in understanding nuances of project management and can make you take smart decisions during project execution.

These questions are based on data given in the Case related to resource allocation and priority setting just before this lecture. There are four multiple choice questions to apply your understanding of the concepts. Solutions are given in the video itself. So, if you want to try on your own, pause the video, see the question, solve that and play the video to check your answer and go to the nest question.

It takes a WBS with optimistic time, most likely time and pessimistic time estimates of activities and discusses about uncertainties and risks involved in the activities based on that.

This lecture computes expected project completion time and variance for the project under probabilistic situation.

It takes the same project for which WBS with probabilistic time estimates has been discussed earlier in this section and the expected project completion time and variance have been computed. This lecture goes further to find the probability of project being completed before different planned times. It uses Normal Distribution table to find the probability.

It decides about the desired probability of project completion in planned time and computes the project time plan to get that probability of success.

Here, few questions are given related to project management in probabilistic situation. Answers are also given. It will help if you do these questions yourself. Detail answer in video form will be made available as resource to this lecture.