Project Management Network diagram Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Project Management Network diagram - Essay Example An event is defined as the starting or ending point for a group of activities and an activity is the work required to proceed from one event or point of time to another.(Kerzner, 1992). The numbers over the arrow specifies the time needed. To know the relationships between activities what job precedes a particular job, what job immediately follows this job and what jobs can run concurrently have to be listed and the time required for the completion is estimated. Based on the chronological order in which they have to be completed, the following network diagram is constructed: From the above diagram we can understand the sequence of activities and their relative importance in the completion of the project. From the information provided we can tabulate and determine the critical path of the project. The Critical path is the sequence of activities which are crucial because delays to them will delay the completion of the project as a whole(Needham, 1997). The late finish and the late finish of the activities are calculated first. The early finish is the optimistic estimate of the completion time of the specific activity and the late finish is the pessimistic estimate of the duration of the activity. The slack time is the difference between the early finish and the late finish. In other words, the slack time denotes the time duration which can be delayed without delaying the entire project. But there are some activities which have the slack time zero, which means that these activities cannot be delayed. These activities are critical for the successful complet ion of the project because they cannot be delayed. The Appendix - 1 shows the calculation slack time of the activities. The calculation shows that the critical path consists of activities, A, D, H, I, J which are crucial for the completion of the project because they do not have any slack time. b) Normal distribution curves are very useful to analyze the frequency of data. When we construct a standard normal probability distribution table, the relationship between the mean of the distribution and the random variable is established. The formula used is: Z = x - / , Where, Z = number of standard deviations from x to the mean of this distribution X = value of the random variable with which we are concerned = mean of the distribution of this random variable = standard deviation of this distribution The value obtained from using the above mentioned formula is