When you finish building a pedestrian bridge project, due to your great performance, you have been appointed as the project manager for the refurbishing/redesigning of the Sheffield Train Station. In this project, you faced A BIG CHALLENGE that needs to deal with the help of what you have learnt during the Project & Quality Management module at SHU:

Challenge: In this project, the Fire Alarm System is required to be refurbished and will need to be installed within a specific time frame of the project. Installing theAnalogue Addressable Fire Detection System was requested by the investors as it provides intelligent fire detection that can provide the exact location of any fires, smoke, heat, contamination or faults and report the status of each device that is connected to the system. This system is already ordered to ensure it will be delivered to the construction site when required. The project budget included the cost of the requested alarm system, and has been approved by the investors. You also selected a vendor manufacturer that would be capable of producing the quality Fire Alarm System that the investors requested. Shortly before the Fire Alarm System was to be delivered to the project site, the vendor emailed you they were running behind schedule because of a delay in receiving components required in the Fire Alarms. The Fire Alarms would be one week late. You reviewed the project schedule and noticed that this would increase the duration of that segment of project work activity, which would, in turn, create other problems on the project site. Therefore, the Fire Alarm System would need to be installed as originally scheduled.

You discussed this with the vendor, and they proposed two options:

• Option 1: an expedite fee could be paid that would push the Fire Alarms up in the manufacturer's schedule, ensuring they would be at the project site on time.
• Option 2: the manufacturer had conventional fire alarms that were already in stock and could be delivered on time. A conventional system will indicate a zone, or area, of a building where a detector has been triggered, but cannot provide an accurate location.

Critically evaluate the above options separately and justify your final decision.