Reference no: EM133523405

Planning and Control Assignment

1) Benefit-cost Analysis

Park Crest Hospital is looking into the possibility of upgrading its patient tracking information system. The current system is a management information system (MIS) that maintains records on the active status of patients residing in the hospital at a given moment. It ties into patient medical treatment files and financial history files. Thus it is possible to determine the current disposition of patients residing in the hospital (e.g., room number, telephone number, attending physicians, attending nurses, etc.); to access facts about the patient's prior medical history; and to access financial data on current and past charges made to the patient.

The current MIS is more than seven years old. In view of changes in information storage and retrieval technology that have recently occurred, as well as the current system's inability to deal with changes that have been made to handle the patient medical treatment files, Park Crest management has decided to upgrade its patient tracking information system. Dr. Ralph Kopecky is made head of a task force to identify possible systems that can replace the existing one.

A one-month search unearths two products that are good candidates. Each is an off-the-shelf product that will be modified by the vendor to fit into a client's existing environment. After lengthy discussions with the vendors, Dr. Kopecky developed the cost and benefit data that appear in the accompanying exhibit. He will employ these data to educate members of the Executive Management Committee about costs and benefits associated with the alternative solutions.

Item	System A	System B
Purchase price	2,300,000	1,600,000
5-year savings compared to using current system	4,100,000	2,700,000
Cost of conversion from old to new system	325,000	300,000
Annual maintenance cost (includes salaries of full-time support personnel)	275,000	200,000

1) Schedule-Cost-Resource

The table below contains cost, resource, and schedule data for a hypothetical project.

Item	Immediate predecessor	Duration (weeks)	Number of resources	Level of effort*	Labor cost	Material cost	Total cost
A		4	2 designers @$1,600 per week per person			$1,000
B	A	2	2 programmers @$1,200 per week per person			$2,000
C	A	4	1 programmer @$1,200 per week			$2,000
D	B	6	1 testers @ $1,000 per week per person			$5,000
E	B,C	3	2 tester @ $1,000 per week per person			$2,000
F	D, E	3	2 integrators @ $1,800 per week per person			$1,000
Total						$13,000

Questions:

a. Create a network diagram for the tasks listed in the table above.

b. Calculate earliest start, latest start, and float for each task.

Task	Earliest start (ES)	Latest start (LS)	Float
A
B
C
D
E
F

c. Given the information captured in the network diagram, create a Gantt chart for the project. In the Gantt chart, picture weekends. (Assume the project begins on a Tuesday and that a week of effort is five working days long.)

d. Calculate level of effort, labor costs, and total costs per task and put the values in the appropriate cells in the first table above.

e. Assume the company being examined here has only two testers. How will this show up on a resource histogram? How should the work for Tasks D and E be leveled? What, if any, impact will the resource leveling have on the project duration?