Ma6088 Project Management: Avoid Delay Assessment Answers

New Stadium 

20,000-seat stadium in the West of Singapore 

Construction: 

West Hub Construction is planning to prepare a bid for the construction of a 20,000-seat stadium in the West of Singapore. The construction must start on June 4^th 2017 and be completed by the January 2^nd 2020. A penalty clause of S$100,000 per day of delay beyond January 2^nd 2020 is written into the contract.

Patrick Tan, the managing director of the company has expressed optimism in gaining the contract having previously completed the construction of a similar type of stadium in Jakarta, Indonesia. Success in completing the 20,000-seat stadium will enhance the company’s chances of securing similar projects not only in Singapore and Malaysia but also in China and Thailand.

The project begins with the clearing of the site. Once the site is cleared, work can start simultaneously on the structure itself and demolishing an adjacent building. From there, the tasks, durations and dependencies of each activity are indicated as follows:

All other holidays are classed as NON-working days.

The construction team works a 5 day week Monday-Friday

The working day is based upon 8 hours, excluding breaks.

Requirements  

Use the information detailed in the case and accompanying activity list to complete the following;

1. Construct a network diagram and a Gantt chart to represent the project. Identify the critical path, project duration and milestones.
2. If the project is undertaken and bad weather introduces a thirty day delay to the project, outline the options available to the Project Manager to overcome this.

Gantt chart

Critical path

Following activities form the critical path:

Milestones

Following are key milestones:

• Setup construction site
• Laying files
• Stadium infrastructure
• Roof installation

Avoid delay in the project execution

Critical path is the longest duration path which should be completed in time for the project to be completed by deadline. Any delay in any of the activity can lead to delaying the entire project. The path contains critical activities which have 0 slack. All other activities have non-zero slack. Delaying these activities do not have any impact on the project completion date.

Following options can be taken to avoid delay (Baguley, 2008):

a. Make use of slack occurring in non-critical activities – Slack is termed as the cushion time period. In the given scenario, if the delays the project by 30 days then project manager an make use of this slack of next activity in project path (Heerkens, 2015). Lay/install playing field has largest slack time period of 250 days so it can absorb the delay if rain happens before it. Similarly, there are following activity at every interval which can avoiding this rain delay:

b. Allocating more resources to the left-over activities to complete the project. However, this option may lead to increase in the project budget (Maylor, 2010). Hence it is not a feasible solution.