This is an individual assignment, meaning you should work independently to gain the best understanding of the material. This assignment is an opportunity to work with a commercial-grade project planning/management tool: Microsoft Project.

The “mini-case,” ElectroniFi, (included below) provides the framework for a new product development effort, including R&D, manufacturing, testing, and marketing. The various components of the initiative span different departments, and the tasks undertaken need to be completed in a particular sequence.

In this assignment, you will act as the overall Project Manager, perform timing analysis, and make recommendations to senior management in your company about how the project should be carried out.

Document to Submit for this Assignment

The assignment consists of your completion of four (4) Report Sections as described below.

Provide your answers as a single report document that would be provided to company management to aid them in making decisions about the project. Attributes of such a professional report should include:

.     Document is nicely formatted for readability (e.g. single spaced, reasonable margins and

fonts). It should not look like a school assignment. Provide the kind of content that you believe a real manager would want to see. For example, you wouldn’t copy/paste a question from this assignment into your report to management. That would look strange to your manager!

.     Clear divisions between the sections of the report as defined below. Key findings and recommendations should be easily seen in each section.

.     Text should be succinct and to the point. You may need to briefly explain a recommendation or a finding, but keep the prose brief. This is what your busy management team would want.

.     In some instances, you should opt for small tables of numbers or graphs to convey information more effectively than written prose.

.     The full Gantt chart and network diagram are too large to be conveniently embedded within the  flow of the main document. Print them as pdf’s and append them to your main report document before submitting. These will likely flow across many pages. Don’t worry about the formatting of this output. As an appendix, they are just there to show the raw output for reference.

.     In the main document, you can embed a small screenshot of an important aspect of a graphic, but refer the reader to the appendix for details.

.     Submit your report as a single .pdf file via Canvas.

REPORT SECTION 1: Project Overview

Based on project information in Table A in the mini-case that follows, construct a Gantt chart and a

network diagram using Microsoft Project. [NOTE: You should enter the data into the Gantt table;

Project will construct your network diagram with the click of a button!] Provide full printouts (pdf) of both in an Appendix to the report.

SELF CHECK: If you have entered the project information correctly, you should find that • “A4) Final design freeze” will occur on July 21, 2025.

• “B9) Plan test market strategy” will begin on October 28, 2025.

Management has asked that you answer these specific questions in the main report:

1.1) With a project start of October 1, 2024, when will the new product be available for sale? 1.2) Which single task has the most amount of “free slack?”  (Note: As a general point of

learning, which you should not reference in your report, study the differences between free slack and total slack that are computed for this project. This will help you understand the differences!)

1.3)  Identify the tasks that are on the critical path to completion of the project. Provide a small table in the report of those tasks.

1.4)  In the base case (Table A), Task C5 should show non-zero values for both free slack and total slack. And they should have different values. Explain briefly how a task can have different   free and total slack (23 sentences).

1.5)  For Task C5, add a predecessor that causes both free and total slack to go to zero. That means that C5 is now on the critical path. State (a) what the new predecessor is that puts C5 on the critical path, and (b) whether that new predecessor is logical in the project plan. In other words, while it is easy to change the predecessor in Project, decide as project manager whether this change makes sense.

REPORT SECTION 2: Adjusting the Schedule for Delays

2.1)  Management is concerned that final testing with customers (Task B6) could take significantly   longer than originally projected at 4 weeks. Using the information in the Gantt, how would  you answer your boss’s urgent and worried question: “I think that 4 week estimate is way off! I actually think it could take twice as long as that, and I’m worried that will kill our launch

date!” (2–3 sentences)

2.2)  Early in the project, the entire in-house legal department leaves the company. The new legal

team has been hired, but is desperately backed up with work. It looks like Task B5 is going to   take 20 weeks, rather than the original plan of 10 weeks. Make that change in the Gantt. What is the new project completion date?

2.3)  Make 2 recommendations to management that could bring the project closer to the original   finish date if this delay in Task B5 occurs. Look for opportunities to save time in the project by logically making tasks parallel, rather than serial (i.e. changing predecessors).

Another technique is to find tasks that can overlap partially. That means you don’t need to finish a task completely before starting the next task. That is entered in the predecessor as a “lead time.” For example, a predecessor might be written as “20FS-2wks” where FS means a normal “finish-to-start” dependency. With the lead of “-2wks” the task can start 2 weeks before the end of task 20.

Make at least one “lead time” recommendation. Briefly support the rationale of each of your recommended changes and state the impact on the project schedule.

Working in Microsoft Project for this Assignment

These are important aspects of using Microsoft Project to complete this assignment. You will be creating a new project, and getting the initial settings organized is important to your ultimate success.

.     You will access Microsoft Project software via “myapps.brown.edu” and the “MyApps:Engineering Desktop” virtual machine (VM).

–  https://ithelp.brown.edu/kb/articles/get-started-with-myapps-at-brown

.     MyApps provides a fully operational Microsoft Windows computing environment that is essentially identical to having a personal computer running Windows. The VM runs inside a browser window  on your own computer. Microsoft Project is “pre-loaded” onto these VM’s for your use.

.     When using MyApps, remember that files you create in Microsoft Project are stored on your “network drive” or “OneDrive.” You can learn more about this here:

–  https://ithelp.brown.edu/kb/articles/get-started-with-microsoft-onedrive-for-students

Do some important set-up steps to get your Project window ready.

.     When you create a new blank project in MS Project, the default columns are

To see all these columns, you can either horizontally scroll the left side of the Project window, or stretch the column area at the vertical divider that separates it from the Gantt chart on the right.

Hide the “Resource Names” column (right-click in the column header); this information will not be used for this exercise. Add “Free Slack” and “Total Slack” columns (click the “Add New Column”  header and you will get a list of all the column options). Your columns should look like this:

.     There is a column called “Task Mode.” For each task, there is a pop-up selection for either

“Manually scheduled” or “Auto scheduled.” In this project, every task except Task B1 should be set to “Auto Scheduled.” The project starting point is Task B1.

You can set the default scheduling mode at the bottom of the Project window by selecting “Auto Scheduled” from the pop-up labeld “New Tasks.”

.     You will need to set the “Project Start Date” to October 1, 2024, to answer the questions below. Go to the Project toolbar and click “Project Information.”

.     Since Task B1 is manually set to be the starting point for the project, its start date should also be set to 10/1/24.

.     When entering the information for this project into Microsoft Project, it is good practice to use the “Summary Task” capability. Group tasks that are related. There are several ways to do this, but   one way is to enter all the tasks, and then “demote” the ones that should be under a summary

task. This process would look like this:

Enter the tasks

Select one that should be “demoted” to sub-tasks and click the “demote” icon in the Task toolbar

And you should see something like this after demoting the tasks on rows 2–4.

The summary task is bold, and has a small “collapse” triangle that hides the sub-tasks. In a

complex Gantt, this can be a very helpful “outline” that allows you to control how much detail you are looking at.

.     As you enter the task descriptions from Table A below, you can shorten them to just the key

words. Combined with the “summary task” outlining described above, a nice-looking Gantt task list will look something like this for your project:

.     In Microsoft Project, a “milestone” is a task with Duration=0. You can, and should, assign

predecessors to it. Milestones are the important points in a project that management might want to know about.

.     It is important in developing a Gantt to tie every task and milestone to all of its logical

driving predecessors, whether or not it seems in the initial planning that those

predecessors will likely be on the critical path. Without that, as the schedule develops (and gets more complex), or as the project gets under way and unexpected things happen, this is the   only way you can insure that changes to dependent task completion dates are correctly adjusted.

.     In Microsoft Project, predecessors are referenced by their task number, which is at the far left

side of the window. These might also be called “row numbers” like you would have in a

spreadsheet. In Table A, the predecessors are shown as “A1” or “A2, B3,” etc. But notice that the task labeled A1 may be on row 2, as show here. So, in the predecessor column you would enter   a “2” to indicate task A1.

.     The assignment calls for you to create a network diagram. This is done very simply after you

have finished entering the information into the Gantt chart. In the “Task” tab of Project, click on the “Gantt Chart” drop-down menu at the far left, and select “Network Diagram.”

.     FINALLY, there are many interesting things you can do in MS Project! Consider creating a dummy project and explore, explore, explore!

Mini-case: ElectroniFi’s New Product

ElectroniFi is a medium-sized consumer electronics company. Annual sales hover in the $50– 100 million range. In this fast-moving industry, there is constant pressure to innovate and introduce new products, or meaningful improvements on existing products, on an ever-accelerating schedule. A new, wearable

version of an existing product has been proposed by the marketing group and has been approved by senior management to move forward.

You have been assigned the role of Project Manager. Since the company has historically used traditional project management methods (Gantt charts and waterfall planning), you decide to produce the initial

project plan in that way.

Three major components comprise the development and eventual launch of the new product.

.     Research and development / manufacturing

.     Marketing

.     Advertising and promotion

Each of these groups has its own manager.

See the Table A below for task names, duration, and predecessors.