Answers to Review Questions

1. C. The critical path is the longest activity sequence in the network. It has zero float or slack time, and it controls the project end date.

2. A. A dependency such as weather conditions or a specific season that is outside the list of project activities is an external dependency. A finish to finish relationship means that the successor task cannot finish until the predecessor task completes. A mandatory dependency is created by the nature of the work.

3. D. Analogous estimating is also called top down estimating. It is used early in the project when there is not enough detail to do a detailed estimate. The estimate is done based on a similar project. Expert judgment relies on people most familiar with the tasks to complete the estimates. Fast tracking and crashing are forms of duration compression.

4. B. There is a finish to start dependency relationship between Task A and Task B. You do not have enough information to determine if the dependency between the two tasks is mandatory, discretionary, or external.

5. B. Precedence diagramming is the most used diagramming method. Activity on arrow is a less-used diagramming method that uses arrows to represent the tasks. CPM is a schedule-development technique. Although network diagrams are sometimes called PERT charts , PERT is actually a seldom-used, specialized schedule-development technique that uses weighted averages.

6. A. Duration compression involves either crashing the schedule by adding more resources or creating a fast track by working activities in parallel that would normally be done in sequence. Activity sequencing is the process of determining the order in which tasks must be worked. Precedence diagramming method, the most common form of the network diagram, is a depiction of the project activities and the interrelationships among these activities. Activity definition is the process of defining all the tasks required to complete the project deliverables.

7. C. Float or slack time is the time a task may be started late or the additional duration a task may use without impacting project completion.

8. B. The tools use to calculate critical path are forward pass, backward pass, and float calculation. Duration compression is a technique used in schedule development.

9. C. Early finish is calculated by adding Activity Bs task duration to its early start date.

10. D. The late finish is always the same as the early finish. Float is always zero on the critical path activities. The critical path is always the longest path on the network diagram.

11. A. You only have one admin, so crashing the project (bringing in multiple folks to parallel tasks) probably isnt the solution. You cant reduce the number of serversostensibly because by the time youve gotten to this step in the project, requirement-gathering has illustrated that you will need this many. Purchasing a VM server probably wont help because its as complex to bring up as the six individual servers, what with the underlying VM software and the individual partitions.

12. B. Tasks on the critical path arent necessarily the most important, theyre just the ones that have zero float timemeaning you have no wiggle room from start to finish. Because of that, the tasks on the critical path should, if represented well, represent the actual complete duration of the project. Tasks on the critical path dont necessarily have to be done firstbut they must be done in the order that youve defined with their predecessors and successors. Once youve defined the tasks and figured out what the critical path is (and obtained sign-off) you dont want to add tasks to it because this represents scope slippage.

13. E. Building the servers, installing Oracle on them, and bringing up the schemas represents work toward the milestone, but does not adequately represent that youve reached the milestone. Only task e, which says that youve successfully tested the servers as database servers, indicates that youve reached your goal.

14. C. As you can see from the answer graphic, you have to count the Saturdays and Sundays plus the holidays that are included in the projects calendar days. Even though the project only takes 15 days, youll require 23 to account for days off.

    

15. A, B, E. The 2000 Guide to the PMBOK (glossarypage 203) says that a milestone is a representation of a significant event in the projectoften the production of a major project deliverable . Therefore, when you shift from one project phase to another in your WBS, representing the completion of a group of tasks that resulted in that phase completion, or youve completed all the deliverables and youve now shifted from the Executing/Controlling to the Closing process group , you have achieved a milestone. There is a lot of room for gray area discussion about what actually makes up a milestone in any given projectits fundamental that you would arrive at those milestone designations by communicating with your team to determine what the milestones are and then communicate outward to your stakeholders. All interested parties should know when youve hit a key milestone.

16. D. As a result of finishing the scope document and requirements documents, you probably already know whos going to be on the project team. What you dont have a good feel for, at least yet, is the tasks that have to be done. A white board and sticky note session with your project team would be a good starting point in directing you to a network diagram that ( hopefully) everyone can live with.

17. B. As an experienced DBA, he probably has the ability to give you a fairly good estimate of what its going to take to build the database in MySQL. Much of the design work in databases is done before the DBA hits the UI ( user interface) to actually create the tables so you can be reasonably sure of the estimate of work. However, that being said, you cannot stipulate for positive the duration of the task.

18. A. Heres the wrinkle with such a proposal: The developers are smart enough to understand that the amount of time required to write the new programs will be diminished by adopting this new software development methodology; however, how long will it take them to fully envelop the new principles of this methodology? In other words, if youre used to doing a thing a certain wayin fact youve been doing it that way for a long timeand then you learn a new, faster way, how long does it take you to integrate the new method into your skill set? As a project manager, you have to somehow figure out the delta in the two (the difference between the improvement in coding speed versus the time required to adopt the new methodology). If theres a significant difference, then its probably worth your while to adopt the new technique.

19. C. The critical path is the series of consecutive activities that represent the longest necessary path through the network diagram. You use up 5 days with Task A, then 7 days with B, 10 days with C, and a final 5 days with Task E, for a total of 27 days. Even though Task D cannot fire off before Task A is completed, A-D-E only uses 13 days.

20. C. Tasks A, B, D, and G represent the longest dependent path through the network diagram, so the critical path requires 41 days.