Case Study Assignment #7
“The Scheduling Dilemma”
1. Case Overview - Your Overview of the Case
This is a very interesting case where Sarah, the project manager is anticipating scheduling issues as
the go-ahead date f
...
Case Study Assignment #7
“The Scheduling Dilemma”
1. Case Overview - Your Overview of the Case
This is a very interesting case where Sarah, the project manager is anticipating scheduling issues as
the go-ahead date for her project is approaching. As per the procedure of her company, Sarah was
assigned as the project manager for this project starting from the time when the proposal was
underway, assuming that the company would get the contract.
This project was different from the other projects that Sarah’s company had experience making
proposals for, in terms of the go-ahead date after the contract has been awarded. Functional managers
in Sarah’s company had a good handle on making proposals for the contracts that have go-ahead
dates within a week or two after the contract award, and the contract award would happen in about a
week after the proposals have been submitted. Such a considerably short timeline between making the
proposal and go-ahead date for the contract made estimation and scheduling easier for functional
managers, as they could accurately forecast who would be available to work on the project. For most
cases, the schedule prepared at the time of proposal would be followed with a few changes during the
actual project execution. Sarah’s project was different and posed estimation challenges for the team
because the go-ahead date was after three months of contract award. Estimating effort and resources
and scheduling was difficult because it had to be based on assumptions instead of ‘fairly known’
availability of resources in near future.
Functional managers made proposal assuming the availability of average employee for Sarah’s project
after go-ahead. Sarah was aware of the risks involved with making proposal based on such
assumptions. Sarah would have to deal with the situation of either cost over-run if above-average
employee was assigned or the slip in schedule if below-average employee was assigned in order to
meet goals in terms of both cost and schedule. Sarah was silently hoping that her company would not
get the contract, but actually they were awarded with the contract with the time of three months before
the go-ahead date for the project. When Sarah approached functional managers to prepare a final
schedule, she was told to wait until two to three weeks prior to the go-ahead date for effort and duration
based on resource availability. Sarah was afraid for her project facing troublesome situation, because
she knew that the resources were already allocated to other projects and those projects were also
facing problems.
As the go-ahead date was approaching, Sarah was assigned average or above-average resources for
her project and she could see her fear come true. Sarah prepared the new schedule with the recent
information provided by functional managers and she estimated at least two weeks of schedule overrun for a four month project. Sarah worked on schedule compression techniques before informing the
client about this situation. Sarah explored the possibilities of having team work overtime, adding more
resources, outsourcing some of the work and working in parallel instead of following a serial pattern,
but none of those techniques were proven to be beneficial in compressing the schedule and Sarah
believed that schedule will slip. Sarah was at a point where she had to make a decision about when
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