The Nutri-Sports Energy Bar project
The Nutri-Sports Energy Bar project require specific measures of management to facilitate the success of achieving the final product. According to Burke (2013), project management requires specific skills that incorporate various planning tools in order to facilitate success. The argument means that the manager has to incorporate various tools such as Gant chart, PERT, or CPM diagram network for having a clear picture on the feasibility of the project as well as resource allocation. For the presented case, the use program evaluation and review technique is the most important approach. Using the provided information about the tasks and their optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic times provides the following PERT diagram.
The PERT diagram
The PERT diagram above represents the information about the duration of each task of the project. The last node is the completion node while the first node is the start node. The nodes are designated as red for completion and green for start.
From the above diagram, there are 13 nodes, meaning the project can take several paths. In the case of NutriStar as seen above, the project can take 32 different possible paths. Gray and Larson (2017) point out the critical path identifies the most critical activities of the project. For the NutriStar project, the critical tasks are A, B, C, H, I, J, K, L, M. This therefore means the critical path is A-B-C-H-I-J-K-L-M as shown in the diagram and the expected completion time is 22.5 months.
Question 2
Process resource allocation enables the project manager and the organization to determine areas that require intensive resources. According to Meredith, Mantel, and Shafer (2017), adequate planning of resource allocation would ensure that the manager assigns resources to the most critical tasks of the project. In this case, the utilization of material, financial, and human resources should focus on the delivery of the project's objectives. Poor resource allocation is characteristic of leading to poor achievement of the project's scope.
From the provided information, it is evident that the project manager allocated adequate amount of funds to the project's most important tasks. For instance, recruitment and training is a task whose objective is to ensure that the right people work on the planned project, thereby enhancing the ease of achieving positive results. Other important activities such as employee mobilization, detailed engineering also have adequate funding. However, one important recommendation is to channel more resource toward activity J (pre-start inspection) and L (solving start-up problems) since they are useful in ensuring that the final product is according to the project's expectations.
Question 3
The project manager would use a computer model of the project to anticipate variables as well as estimating risks. In itself, simulation entails the use of mathematical tools to explore the impact of variances on the project's outcomes. Simulation analysis would provide the project manager with the opportunity to evaluate unforeseen events that are likely that have an impact on the timelines of the project variables (Pai, Hsu, " Lin, 2014). Therefore, this approach would benefit the NutriStar project in the sense that manager would have information about risks as expressions of probability. Finally, using computer simulation techniques would be useful in ensuring that the manager has adequate time to mitigate for unforeseen challenges and plan to avoid issues that may delay the project delivery.
References
Burke, R. (2013). Project management techniques. Ringwood: Burke Publishing.
Gray, C. F., " Larson, E. W. (2017). Project management: The managerial process. New York,
NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
Meredith, J. R., Mantel, S. J., " Shafer, S. M. (2017). Project management: A strategic
managerial approach. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Pai, P.-F., Hsu, M.-F., " Lin, L. (June 01, 2014). Enhancing decisions with life cycle analysis for
risk management. Neural Computing and Applications, 24, 1717-1724.
