INSTRUCTIONS: The CEO of Kibby and Strand (fictitious clothing company) recently signed a contract with Amazon to market and distribute some of its products. As a result, the CEO decided to build a new addition to the current building to accommodate the need for more shipping dock space. Shipping will move to the new addition and Receiving will expand into the space Shipping currently uses.
You are the Operations Manager and the CEO has tasked you to come up with a project plan for moving the Shipping Department to the new addition and expanding the Receiving Department into Shipping’s old space. Your guidance is, “come up with a plan to shift move Shipping to the new addition and expand Receiving capacity using Shipping’s current space with minimal impact to operations. We need to meet our contractual deadlines, so there is to be no interruptions to operations.” You are told that you will be able to buy additional forklifts and hire staff for Receiving’s increasing capacity.
Develop a project plan that will allow production to continue while the movement of machines and staff into their new locations is taking place. The plan needs to list assumptions, constraints, and a network diagram for the move. Also, identify the critical path in your plan and its length in days.
This week you’re preparing a project management plan. The difference between a project plan and the other plans you created is a project has defined start and end dates, whereas an operational plan is ongoing. Your project management plan needs to consider the construction timeline for the new expansion, and meet the intent of the CEO’s tasking. He/she is expecting a project plan that results in operations being conducted as much as possible while the expansion is taking place. You can have some downtime, but it needs to be minimized.
The three key items you need in the project management plan are: 1) a task list with task durations; 2) a network diagram depicting the order the tasks are completed; and 3) the critical path, including length, within the network diagram for the project. Each task has a defined start and stop, and you are free to come up with those dates…just make them somewhat realistic.
The project plan should be prepared as a Microsoft™ Word document. There is no minimum or maximum in terms of the word count; however, the response should explicitly address all required components of this discussion assignment. The document should be prepared consistent with the APA writing style and reflect higher-level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis, and or evaluation).
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION FROM THE INSTRUCTOR: The three key items you need in the project management plan are: 1) task list with task durations called a Work Breakdown Study (WBS) to complete the project; 2) network diagram depicting the order the tasks are to be completed; and 3) the critical path, including length, within the network diagram for the project. Each task has a defined start and stop, and you are free to come up with those dates…just make them somewhat realistic. Once you have a detailed task list containing all the tasks, to include their durations, then you construct the networking diagram. This diagram provides a visual of how the tasks are sequenced in the most efficient manner to complete the project in the minimal amount of time. There will be some tasks you can do in parallel so take advantage of that when creating the network diagram. After the network diagram is constructed, you should see multiple paths and one of these is deemed the critical path. The length of this path will be the shortest amount of time you can finish the project if all tasks on the path take their full duration to complete. If any task on the critical path slips and takes longer than planned, that will slip the end date of the project by the same amount.
