Assignment on Project and Activity Duration

This is an individual assignment. You will have to submit one (1) xlsx file and one (1) mpp file. PDF files are NOT accepted.  Note there are some notes below indicating things that are "out of scope" for the assignment.  Remember, all assignment work must be your own original work, do NOT use images, Excel, MPP or other files, or data from any other source including other students, your files have to be 100% completely original, your own work.

You will be taking the work you did in your previous assignment (save a copy first), modifying it in a newer mpp file, and creating an xlsx file.  A major objective in this assignment is to make sure the project and activity durations in your mpp file match the project and activity durations in your xlsx.  This is an iterative process.

Another objective is to understand the relationship in our mpp files between PERT (O, M, P and skewing), durations, work, and %Units.  For example, we may think an activity only needs one person a half day to complete so based on 8 hours a day that's 4 hours of work and a 4 hour duration.  But we don't want to use half day durations, they are not practical.  If we had activity A set at .5 days, and a successor B activity of .5 days our mpp file would show both would be completed in a day.  But what if the worker for A showed up in the afternoon, B couldn't be done until the next day, so frequently we use minimum 1-day durations and durations in integers (e.g 1, 4, 7, 23 days). 

• Create a worksheet in your xlsx file and name it "WBS Duration Dictionary".  Note the OMP durations are skewed with the duration between P-M greater than M-O, make sure your estimates have this skewing.

• To keep things simple, only have one human resource working on an activity and make your human resources in your Resource Sheet set up with Max Units at 100%, which means they're working 8 hours a day.

• Use the diagram to set up your worksheet for all your activities. In the example for Level Property, you initially used your M estimate of 3 days for the time and work for a single worker to get the activity done working 8 hours a work day. This means there are 24 hours of work for this activity.

You then decided to use PERT and consulted with some experts to get an O and P estimate (which were skewed), and your PERT calculated to 3.33.  B you do NOT want to round down, you're only going to RoundUp so you don't squeeze your durations.  So your Revised PERT is 4 days, which means the 24 hours of work will be done in 4 days rather than 3, the labourer will only be assigned 6 hours of work per day.  Given the labourer is available 8 hours a day at 100% Units, you would use 75% units to get 6 hours of work per day.