Question

Gordon Rivers, the City Manager of Saratoga, Florida and Jay Andrews, the project manager for Major Design Corporation (MDC), must manage this project. ?We need the ?intake and transmission main? designed, bid, and completed in 35 weeks. The City of Saratoga has a future $2 million dollar federal grantriding on the project getting done on time,? Mr. Rivers said. Jay nodded in agreement. Mr. Rivers continued by saying, ?Jay, the project needs to come in on-schedule and within the budget. Now take this schedule back and figure out how we are going to do it.? Notice that the case does not provide how long the current project takes (which is 40 weeks). Therefore, the student needs to do a basic CPM analysis and compute the total normal costs, critical path, activity slacks, and current project completion time. Then they must crash the project from 40 to 35 weeks and eventually two paths become critical and require the crashing of both CPs.

Project Description

The objective of the project is to design a fully functional surface water intake that is protective of the environment, will last at least 30 years, and will have a low life cycle cost (i.e. capital, maintenance, and energy consumption). For this type of project, engineering design accounts for 20 percent of total project cost. The design stage is also important because the decisions made during design lock in 80 percent or more of the life cycle costs of the project. The case describes each project activity and provides the data below.

Alternative Water Supply (AWS) ? Single Project

Activity ID	Description	Precedence	Regular Time (weeks)	Crash Time (weeks)	Normal Cost Estimate	Crash Cost Estimate
A	Conceptual Design	none	4	3	$30,000	$33,500
B	Preliminary Design	A	12	10	$52,000	$58,000
C	Final Design	B	19	16	$59,000	$76,000
D	Environmental Permit Application Preparation	B	8	5	$48,000	$58,200
E	Environmental Permit Review and Approval	D	4	4	$38,000	$38,000
F	Building Permit Application Preparation	E	2	1	$35,000	$38,000
G	Building Permit Review and Approval	F	4	4	$6,000	$6,000
H	Property Acquisition	B	20	18	$90,000	$115,000
I	Bid Project	C, H	4	4	$6,000	$6,000
J	Construction Start (Dummy Activity)	G, I	0	0	$0	$0

Decisions and Analysis

Jay manages about a half dozen engineering projects at any one time so he asks you to analyze this project for ways to complete the project in 35 weeks. Jay would like to meet with you tomorrow to discuss the results of your analysis. To organize your analysis you outline the following steps.

1.) What are your final recommendations?

Answer 1

We can arrange the data in the following form and calculate the total normal cost along with additional cost requirement to crash the particilar activity.

the solution will be as follows: