Part One: Flexing Schedules and Resources to Your Advantage
As you have seen, for some activities there are options for how you might choose to allocate resources to tasks over time, and there are strategies you can use to choose the best options for you. Now you will reflect on some of your past work experiences in project management in which you’ve used flexibility to achieve your goals.
Answer the following questions, using as much space as you need.
- Think of a project you have worked on for which you needed to use some flexibility in allocating resources to tasks for some aspect of the work. Describe what happened in that case. What did you do? How did that flexibility help you accomplish your goals?
- Think of a past situation in which an activity was further decomposed (split into multiple activities) to address person availabilities. What happened in that case? How did you break down the activity to resolve the resource constraints? (If you have not had this experience, imagine how such a case might arise within your organization. How would you try to handle it?)
- Leverage that past experience now. Bearing in mind the lessons of this module, what do you think you can do differently in the future to get a better result from your scheduling and resource allocation strategies? Share your ideas.
Part Two: Using Critical Project Management Tools
Answer the following questions about the project network below, using as much space as you need.