Scenario: Your organisation, ABC construction group has made a winning bid to construct a new manufacturing plant. The client expects the plant to be functional within a year. You are assigned as the Project Manager to ensure that the whole project stays on schedule. The two important conditions as per the client contract are:-

• ABC construction group will incur a penalty if the work is not completed by the deadline of 47 weeks from now.
• ABC construction group will be provided additional incentive if the work is completed within 40 weeks.

The table below describes the activity list for ABC construction group for this project:-

Activity	Description	Immediate predecessors	Estimated duration
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N	Excavate Lay the foundation Put up rough wall Put up the roof Install exterior plumbing Install interior plumbing Put up exterior siding Do exterior painting Do the electric work Put the wallboard Install the flooring Interior painting Exterior fixtures Interior fixtures	- A B C C E D E,G C F,I J J H K,L	2 weeks 4 weeks 10 weeks 6 weeks 4 weeks 5 weeks 7 weeks 9 weeks 7 weeks 8 weeks 4 weeks 5 weeks 2 weeks 6 weeks

(Source: - Turner, 2016)

For any given activity, its immediate predecessors (as given in the third column of Table) are those activities that must be completed by no later than the starting time of the given activity. (Similarly, the given activity is called an immediate successor of each of its immediate predecessors.) For example, the top entries in this column indicate that:-

• Excavation does not need to wait for any other activities.
• Excavation must be completed before starting to lay the foundation.
• The foundation must be completely laid before starting to put up the rough wall, etc.

When a given activity has more than one immediate predecessor, all must be finished before the activity can begin. In order to schedule the activities, you have consulted with each of the crew supervisors to develop an estimate of how long each activity should take when it is done in the normal way. These estimates are given in the rightmost column of Table. Adding up these times gives a grand total of 79 weeks, which is far beyond the deadline for the project. Fortunately, some of the activities can be done in parallel, which substantially reduces the project completion time.

Given all this information, please develop answers to the following questions:-

1. Develop a project network diagram to visually display the whole project and describe the project network diagram [10 Marks]
2. Schedule the whole project with PERT/CPM. In doing so, you must be able to satisfy these crucial objectives:-

• Total time required to complete the project if no delays occur
• The start and finish of individual activities to meet the project completion deadline
• The start and finish of individual activities if no delays occur
• Critical activities where any delays must be avoided to prevent delaying project completion
• The delay that can be tolerated for other activities, without delaying project completion.