MGMT 625 Week 5 DB Forum 3 Thread Example

Discussion Board Forum 3: Thread

MGMT 625 Project Planning & Scheduling, Discussion Board Forum 3: Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the hospital's renovation are composites standing in for the course's own forum; Wilson's text, the scholarly sources and Scripture are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for MGMT 625.

Our hospital is renovating its 28-bed medical intensive care unit to replace aging headwalls, add negative-pressure capability and enlarge each room for modern equipment. The unit cannot close. Critical care leaders require at least 21 beds open at all times, so the work is divided into four phases of seven rooms. Each phase includes demolition, mechanical and electrical work, finishes, commissioning of the new air handling and an infection control inspection, and the next phase cannot start until the previous rooms are back in service. Every day a phase runs long, the unit operates at 21 beds, and on busy nights the hospital transfers patients to a sister facility forty miles away.

The first phase was scheduled with the critical path method, as Wilson (2014) describes it: the longest sequence of dependent tasks determined the duration, and each task carried its own estimate. Those estimates were padded. Each subcontractor added safety to its own duration, and the plan totaled 63 days. The phase took 72. No single task failed badly; the drywall crew started two days late because the electricians were still finishing, the commissioning agent arrived on the last scheduled day rather than the first, and several crews finished exactly on their padded dates even when the work was simpler than expected. The safety built into each task was used up within that task and never carried forward.

Steyn (2001), examining the fundamentals of critical chain scheduling, describes the alternative. Task estimates are cut to aggressive durations, the time taken out of them is gathered into one reserve placed after the last task of the chain, and feeding buffers protect the chain where noncritical paths join it. The approach also treats resources as part of the chain, so a crew shared between tasks is scheduled as a constraint. For our second phase, we cut task estimates by about a third, placed a 14-day project buffer before the inspection and a 4-day feeding buffer where the medical gas work joins the main sequence. The phase finished in 60 days, using 9 days of the buffer. Just as important, the buffer gave the project manager a single number to watch. Instead of asking eight subcontractors whether they were on track, she reported each week how much of the buffer had been consumed against how much of the chain was complete, and when medical gas work slipped three days, the team saw the effect on the buffer at once and moved an inspector's visit forward to recover it.

Critical chain has critics. Herroelen and Leus (2001), testing the approach on benchmark problems with commercial software, reported that the usual rule of thumb, a buffer equal to half the safety stripped from the tasks, can leave a project carrying far more protection than it needs, and their experiments favored rebuilding the schedule and the chain at intervals as the project moved. That fits our experience: our buffer was larger than necessary, and in phase three we sized it from phase two's actual variance instead.

The proverb sets the order for a farmer who wants a home: finish the outdoor work and make the fields ready first, then build (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 24:27). Sequencing is a form of wisdom: doing first what makes the rest possible, and protecting the order rather than each step. For our unit, that meant protecting the whole phase rather than every subcontractor's task.

Classmates: on your projects, where does schedule safety actually sit, and does anyone watch it?

References

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Herroelen, W., & Leus, R. (2001). On the merits and pitfalls of critical chain scheduling. Journal of Operations Management, 19(5), 559-577. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-6963(01)00054-7

Steyn, H. (2001). An investigation into the fundamentals of critical chain project scheduling. International Journal of Project Management, 19(6), 363-369. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-7863(00)00026-0

Wilson, R. (2014). A comprehensive guide to project management schedule and cost control. Pearson FT Press.