XYZ Co. is about to begin it's most important construction project of the year. 'The management would like to use the project management concepts to help plan and control this key project. The eight major activities and their precedence relationship are given in Table 3. Due to the hot construction market, the top management team have concluded that they must accelerate the construction work and finish the project by 15 months from now. Although this will require substantially increasing an already huge budget, the management feels that this will pay off in much larger earnings if they can finish this current project soon to be able to bid for other projects next year. 'The project management team has gathered additional data (crash time, and crash costs) as given in Table 3. Assume the cost of crashing any activity per month is constant. a)Determine the least costly way of meeting the new deadline of 15 months and the corresponding additional cost. Clearly indicate the activities to crash, the resulting expected project time and associated costs at each step. b) Plot the crashing cost curve (project duration vs. total project cost). Table 3: The normal costs, normal times, crash cost, crash times