You work for Nokia in its global cell phone group. You have been made project manager for the design of a new cell phone. Your supervisors have already scoped the project so you have a list showing the work breakdown structure, and this includes major project activities. You must plan the project schedule and calculate project du-ration. Your boss wants the schedule on his desk tomorrow morning!
1. Draw a project network that includes all the activities.
2. Calculate the start and finish times for each activity and determine the minimum number of weeks for completing the project. Find the activities that are on the critical path for completing the project in the shortest time.
3. Identify slack in the activities not on the project critical path.
4. Your boss would like you to study the impact of making two changes to how the project is organized. The first change involves using dedicated teams that would work strictly in parallel on the activities in each subproject. For example, in subproject P (product specifications) the team would work on P1, P2, P3, and P4 all in parallel. In other words, there would be no precedence relationships within a subproject—all tasks within a subproject would be worked on at the same time and each would take the same amount of time as originally specified. With this new design, all the subprojects would be done sequentially with P done first, then S, D, I, and finally V. What would be the expected impact on how long it would take to complete the project if this change were made?
5. The second change your boss would like you to con-sider would be to select the suppliers during subproject P and have them work directly with the dedicated teams as described in problem 4. This would involve adding an additional activity to subproject P called supplier selection and contract negotiation (P5) with duration of 12 weeks. This new activity would be done in parallel with P1, P2, P3, and P4. Subprojects S and V would be eliminated from the project. What would be the expected impact on how long it would take to complete the project if this additional change were made?
6. Evaluate the impact of making these changes using criteria other than just the time to complete the project. Do you think it would be in Nokia’s best interest to try to make these changes in how it runs this and future cell phone design projects?
