BUSI 681 Week 8 Case Study: Project Model Part 2 Example

Maple Hill Lead Service Line Replacement, Phase 1: Microsoft Project Schedule with Deliverables, Task Breakdown, Dates, Costs and Resources

1. Project Description

Phase 1 of Riverbend Water's lead service line replacement program removes all 420 known lead service lines in the Maple Hill neighborhood, putting copper in place of the public and the private sections of each line alike, from the main to the meter. Full replacement is the point of the project: research on partial replacements found that cutting out only part of a lead line can raise lead release in household plumbing in the short term, and the federal Lead and Copper Rule Improvements generally require systems to remove lead service lines in full over the coming decade (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2024).

The schedule runs from March 1, 2027, to a computed finish of November 29, 2027, using a calendar of five working days a week with six federal holidays removed. The work has four stages. Preparation covers the charter, the state loan, field verification of each line and the design and permits. Procurement selects a replacement contractor through competitive bidding. Customer outreach secures signed access agreements from property owners. Construction then replaces lines in three blocks of 140, followed by restoration, filter distribution, follow-up sampling, the inventory update and closeout. The budget is $5.30 million, and the plan's resource-loaded cost baseline is $4,935,680, leaving a contingency reserve of $364,320, about 7 percent of the budget, held outside the baseline under the sponsor's control. Excluded from the project are household plumbing beyond the meter, water main replacement and the other eight neighborhoods.

2. Principal Deliverables

• 1. Approved project charter and executed state loan agreement.
• 2. Field-verified material record for each of the 420 addresses.
• 3. Stamped replacement design and street-opening permits.
• 4. Executed unit-price construction contract.
• 5. Signed access agreements from property owners.
• 6. 420 full replacements, each with before and after photographs and a completion form.
• 7. Restored sidewalks, driveways and lawns, inspected within 14 days of each replacement.
• 8. Filters and six months of cartridges delivered to every household, and a sampling report covering 100 homes.
• 9. Updated service line inventory and a closeout report with cost per line and lessons for Phase 2.

3. Resource Sheet

Construction and restoration together cost $10,900 per line, under the $11,500 ceiling set as a success criterion in Part 1.

4. Task Breakdown

All dates fall in 2027. Holidays removed from the calendar are Memorial Day, Juneteenth (observed June 18), Independence Day (observed July 5), Labor Day and the Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday.

5. Cost Baseline by Summary Task

6. Critical Path and Float

Microsoft Project's critical path runs from the kickoff through the notice letters, the access agreement campaign, Block A, the follow-up sampling and its report to closeout and acceptance. Construction of Blocks B and C is not on it. Because sampling in Block A homes must wait about three months after their replacement, those homes, not the last block, determine when the closeout can begin; the 100 sampled homes are visited in the order they were replaced, so each sample is drawn about three months after its replacement. Blocks B and C carry roughly seven weeks of float. The project's real bottleneck is a signature on an access agreement, not a crew in a trench. That finding confirms the ranking in Part 1's risk matrix, where owner refusal scored highest, and it tells the sponsor where extra outreach staff would shorten the project. Contractor mobilization also has about three weeks of float, so the task is set to start as late as possible and the notice to proceed will be issued in early June, which avoids paying for an idle crew.

Gray and Larson (2018) describe how resource limits can change a schedule computed from logic alone. The replacement contractor's two crews are the constrained resource here, and the three blocks are linked finish-to-start for that reason: running them in parallel would require crews the contract does not provide. Kolisch and Padman (2001), surveying deterministic scheduling models, treat the resource-constrained problem as a central one in the field, and it is the point at which this plan departs from a schedule drawn from logic alone.

7. Buffer and Milestones

The computed finish of November 29 sits 13 working days ahead of the December 17 completion date promised in Part 1. Rather than spreading that time across tasks as padding, the model holds it as a single project buffer at the end. Herroelen and Leus (2005) review approaches to scheduling under uncertainty, including the proactive use of buffers to protect a schedule against disruption, and an explicit buffer at the end is easier to monitor than hidden slack in every estimate. The buffer is reported to the sponsor each month as days remaining.

Four milestones carry Part 1's risk triggers into the schedule: an access agreement checkpoint on May 3, when fewer than 80 percent signed would trigger the contingency; a weekly production check during each construction block, with two consecutive weeks under 35 lines triggering a third crew; a frost-risk review on October 15, now largely moot because construction ends on August 31; and the sampling report on November 12, when any result above 10 micrograms per liter would trigger repeat flushing and testing at that home.

References

Gray, C. F., & Larson, E. W. (2018). Project management: The managerial process (7th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Herroelen, W., & Leus, R. (2005). Project scheduling under uncertainty: Survey and research potentials. European Journal of Operational Research, 165(2), 289-306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2004.04.002

Kolisch, R., & Padman, R. (2001). An integrated survey of deterministic project scheduling. Omega, 29(3), 249-272. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-0483(00)00046-3

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2024). National primary drinking water regulations for lead and copper: Improvements (LCRI) (89 FR 86418). Federal Register. https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-23549