Jane is the Project Manager (PM) for the delivery of a management information system that includes the design of both the software and hardware parts of the system. The project schedule is given below and includes the innovative use of lags. Also note that the legend for each activity has two figures for slack - one for the start side and another for the finish.

a. Complete the forward and backward pass, calculate the slack for each activity, and identify the Critical Path. [5]

b. Jim is the supervisor in charge of Activity E, which involves the begugging of the software that has been coded. This is an important quality assurance task, to ensure that any flaws (bugs) in the software are identified and eliminated before the system is installed. Jim is however not happy about these "new-fangled" lags around his task and tells Jane that he would much prefer it if there was just a simple flow from tasks C ?E?F without any of these silly lags. Looking at the project overall, from the PM's perspective, what advantage does the project gain from introducing the lags around Jim's activity E? [2]

c. There are two lags around Jim's activity E, a start-start lag and a finish-finish lag, and he wants to know what this is all about - how should he organise his team? If you were the PM, how would you explain to Jim what the practical implications are for when he can start and when he can finish his debugging activity? [4]

d. There are two other lags in the schedule - explain why they are there, and what the practical implications of each one are. [2]

C Code Lag 2 Software 6 E A Debug Design Lag 2 3 5 B D F Order Parts Assemble Install Lag 3 Lag 4 1 3 1 Legend ES ID EF SL Description SL LS Duration LF