ENGINEERING 2125, Spring 2024

“Engineering Management & Decision Making”

Written Assignment Guidelines

“ElectroniFi Project Planning”

This is an individual assignment, meaning you should work independently to gain the best understanding of the material. This assignment is an opportunity to work with a commercial-grade project planning/management tool: Microsoft Project.

The “mini-case,” ElectroniFi, (included below) provides the framework for a new product development effort, including R&D, manufacturing, testing, and marketing. The various components of the initiative span different departments, and the tasks undertaken need to be completed in a particular sequence.

In this assignment, you will act as the overall Project Manager, perform timing analysis, and make recommendations to senior management in your company about how the project should be carried out.

Document to Submit for this Assignment

The assignment consists of your completion of four (4) Report Sections as described below.

Provide your answers as a single report document that would be provided to company management to aid them in making decisions about the project. Attributes of such a professional report should include:

• Document is nicely formatted for readability (e.g. single spaced, reasonable margins and fonts). It should not look like a school assignment. Provide the kind of content that you believe a real manager would want to see. For example, you wouldn’t copy/paste a question from this assignment into your report to management. That would look strange to your manager!

• Clear divisions between the sections of the report as defined below. Key findings and recommendations should be easily seen in each section.

• Text should be succinct and to the point. You may need to briefly explain a recommendation or a finding, but keep the prose brief. This is what your busy management team would want.

• In some instances, you should opt for small tables of numbers or graphs to convey information more effectively than written prose.

• The full Gantt chart and network diagram are too large to be conveniently embedded within the flow of the main document. Print them as pdf’s and append them to your main report document before submitting. These will likely flow across many pages. Don’t worry about the formatting of this output. As an appendix, they are just there to show the raw output for reference.

• In the main document, you can embed a small screenshot of an important aspect of a graphic, but refer the reader to the appendix for details.

• Submit your report as a single .pdf file via Canvas.

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 REPORT SECTION 1: Project Overview

Based on project information in Table A in the mini-case that follows, construct a Gantt chart and a network diagram using Microsoft Project. [NOTE: You should enter the data into the Gantt table; Project will construct your network diagram with the click of a button!] Provide full printouts (pdf) of both in an Appendix to the report.

SELF CHECK: If you have entered the project information correctly, you should find that • “A4) Final design freeze” will occur on July 21, 2025.

• “B9) Plan test market strategy” will begin on October 28, 2025.

Management has asked that you answer these specific questions in the main report:

1.1) With a project start of October 1, 2024, when will the new product be available for sale?

1.2) Which single task has the most amount of “free slack?” (Note: As a general point of learning, which you should not reference in your report, study the differences between free slack and total slack that are computed for this project. This will help you understand the differences!)

1.3) Identify the tasks that are on the critical path to completion of the project. Provide a small table in the report of those tasks.

1.4) In the base case (Table A), Task C5 should show non-zero values for both free slack and total slack. And they should have different values. Explain briefly how a task can have different free and total slack (23 sentences).

1.5) For Task C5, add a predecessor that causes both free and total slack to go to zero. That means that C5 is now on the critical path. State (a) what the new predecessor is that puts C5 on the critical path, and (b) whether that new predecessor is logical in the project plan. In other words, while it is easy to change the predecessor in Project, decide as project manager whether this change makes sense.

REPORT SECTION 2: Adjusting the Schedule for Delays

2.1) Management is concerned that final testing with customers (Task B6) could take significantly longer than originally projected at 4 weeks. Using the information in the Gantt, how would you answer your boss’s urgent and worried question: “I think that 4 week estimate is way off! I actually think it could take twice as long as that, and I’m worried that will kill our launch date!” (2–3 sentences)

2.2) Early in the project, the entire in-house legal department leaves the company. The new legal team has been hired, but is desperately backed up with work. It looks like Task B5 is going to take 20 weeks, rather than the original plan of 10 weeks. Make that change in the Gantt. What is the new project completion date?

2.3) Make 2 recommendations to management that could bring the project closer to the original finish date if this delay in Task B5 occurs. Look for opportunities to save time in the project by logically making tasks parallel, rather than serial (i.e. changing predecessors).

Another technique is to find tasks that can overlap partially. That means you don’t need to finish a task completely before starting the next task. That is entered in the predecessor as a “lead time.” For example, a predecessor might be written as “20FS-2wks” where FS means a normal “finish-to-start” dependency. With the lead of “-2wks” the task can start 2 weeks before the end of task 20.

Make at least one “lead time” recommendation. Briefly support the rationale of each of your recommended changes and state the impact on the project schedule.

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 REPORT SECTION 3: Other Analyses

Prior to continuing to these Section 3 analyses, return your Gantt to the original schedule as created in Section 1. That is, undo any modifications you made in Section 2 before proceeding below.

3.1) The manager who oversees the Advertising and Promotion activities is concerned about not having enough personnel resources to complete the tasks. She would like to request some temporary help from either the R&D or Marketing group to jump in and help. By examining the Gantt, from which tasks in other groups might she best be able to request resources without delaying the project completion date? (For the purposes of this question, assume that reassigned workers from R&D or Marketing would be equally able to help out the Advertising group.)

3.2) Management sees that you have decided to wait to order and install special equipment (Task A7) until the pro forma financial projections are completed (Task B11). You have presumably made this recommendation to reduce project financial risk: “Why waste money on special equipment if the bottom-line analysis does not support it?” Stated another way, you are treating the financial projections as a “go / no-go” decision point. If the financials are bad, the project might be killed, making equipment purchasing an unnecessary expense.

But management is convinced that the product will be a winner and wants to know how much sooner it could launch if the special equipment were ordered immediately after it has been specified (Task A6). Management recognizes that this is a higher risk approach, but feels that the earlier launch may be worth it. How much faster can product be launched under this higher-risk approach? What factors would you recommend that management consider in making their decision whether to proceed with the higher-risk approach?

After answering this question reinstate the original predecessors for Task A7.

3.3) After seeing the Gantt chart you produced, the Marketing manager contacted you with a potential error in your logic. “I don’t really need to wait for the TV and web advertising task (C4) to be complete to start planning the test market strategy (B9). I’d suggest you delete that dependency!”

If you remove that dependency, what is the new product launch date? Which group now is firmly on the critical path?

REPORT SECTION 4: Alternative Project Management Concept

Your boss has recently attended a seminar and learned about scrum/sprint agile project management methodologies. He wonders if this project might be better managed using those principles and has asked for your thinking. Should the traditional Gantt approach be abandoned in favor of a more agile approach?

Write a brief paragraph that outlines your opinion whether the Gantt schedule as constructed for this project should be replaced with scrum/sprint. (There is no single correct answer. Make a clear recommendation, and support it in a few sentences of explanation.)

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 Working in Microsoft Project for this Assignment

These are important aspects of using Microsoft Project to complete this assignment. You will be creating a new project, and getting the initial settings organized is important to your ultimate success.

• You will access Microsoft Project software via “myapps.brown.edu” and the “MyApps:Engineering Desktop” virtual machine (VM).

  – https://ithelp.brown.edu/kb/articles/get-started-with-myapps-at-brown

• MyApps provides a fully operational Microsoft Windows computing environment that is essentially identical to having a personal computer running Windows. The VM runs inside a browser window on your own computer. Microsoft Project is “pre-loaded” onto these VM’s for your use.

• When using MyApps, remember that files you create in Microsoft Project are stored on your “network drive” or “OneDrive.” You can learn more about this here:

– https://ithelp.brown.edu/kb/articles/get-started-with-microsoft-onedrive-for-students Do some important set-up steps to get your Project window ready.

• When you create a new blank project in MS Project, the default columns are

To see all these columns, you can either horizontally scroll the left side of the Project window, or

stretch the column area at the vertical divider that separates it from the Gantt chart on the right.

Hide the “Resource Names” column (right-click in the column header); this information will not be used for this exercise. Add “Free Slack” and “Total Slack” columns (click the “Add New Column” header and you will get a list of all the column options). Your columns should look like this:

• There is a column called “Task Mode.” For each task, there is a pop-up selection for either “Manually scheduled” or “Auto scheduled.” In this project, every task except Task B1 should be set to “Auto Scheduled.” The project starting point is Task B1.

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You can set the default scheduling mode at the bottom of the Project window by selecting “Auto Scheduled” from the pop-up labeld “New Tasks.”

• You will need to set the “Project Start Date” to October 1, 2024, to answer the questions below. Go to the Project toolbar and click “Project Information.”

• Since Task B1 is manually set to be the starting point for the project, its start date should also be set to 10/1/24.

• When entering the information for this project into Microsoft Project, it is good practice to use the “Summary Task” capability. Group tasks that are related. There are several ways to do this, but one way is to enter all the tasks, and then “demote” the ones that should be under a summary task. This process would look like this:

Enter the tasks

Select one that should be “demoted” to sub-tasks and click the “demote” icon in the Task toolbar

And you should see something like this after demoting the tasks on rows 2–4.

The summary task is bold, and has a small “collapse” triangle that hides the sub-tasks. In a complex Gantt, this can be a very helpful “outline” that allows you to control how much detail you are looking at.

• As you enter the task descriptions from Table A below, you can shorten them to just the key words. Combined with the “summary task” outlining described above, a nice-looking Gantt task list will look something like this for your project:

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  • In Microsoft Project, a “milestone” is a task with Duration=0. You can, and should, assign predecessors to it. Milestones are the important points in a project that management might want to know about.

• It is important in developing a Gantt to tie every task and milestone to all of its logical driving predecessors, whether or not it seems in the initial planning that those predecessors will likely be on the critical path. Without that, as the schedule develops (and gets more complex), or as the project gets under way and unexpected things happen, this is the only way you can insure that changes to dependent task completion dates are correctly adjusted.

• In Microsoft Project, predecessors are referenced by their task number, which is at the far left side of the window. These might also be called “row numbers” like you would have in a spreadsheet. In Table A, the predecessors are shown as “A1” or “A2, B3,” etc. But notice that the task labeled A1 may be on row 2, as show here. So, in the predecessor column you would enter a “2” to indicate task A1.

• The assignment calls for you to create a network diagram. This is done very simply after you have finished entering the information into the Gantt chart. In the “Task” tab of Project, click on the “Gantt Chart” drop-down menu at the far left, and select “Network Diagram.”

• FINALLY, there are many interesting things you can do in MS Project! Consider creating a dummy project and explore, explore, explore!

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 Mini-case: ElectroniFi’s New Product

ElectroniFi is a medium-sized consumer electronics company. Annual sales hover in the $50–100 million range. In this fast-moving industry, there is constant pressure to innovate and introduce new products, or meaningful improvements on existing products, on an ever-accelerating schedule. A new, wearable version of an existing product has been proposed by the marketing group and has been approved by senior management to move forward.

You have been assigned the role of Project Manager. Since the company has historically used traditional project management methods (Gantt charts and waterfall planning), you decide to produce the initial project plan in that way.

Three major components comprise the development and eventual launch of the new product. • Research and development / manufacturing

• Marketing

• Advertising and promotion

Each of these groups has its own manager.

See the Table A below for task names, duration, and predecessors.

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TABLE A

Task Activity Label

A. Research and development (R&D) and manufacturing activities

A1 Create product mock-ups for Marketing to use in bottom-up research to establish customer needs

A2 Fabricate several prototype products for use in further customer research

A3 Refine product design based on customer findings

A4 Final design freeze [Milestone]

A5 Investigate purchase of special equipment to enhance production

A6 After the preferred design is determined by Marketing, create the full manufacturing specifications

A7 Place orders for special equipment and install after it arrives

A8 Ramp up production to prepare for national roll-out of the product

A9 “First lot to stock” ready for customer shipments

B. Marketing activities

B1 Initial product conceptualization and brainstorming [NOTE: This task is the first in the project schedule. Task A1 shows B1 as a predecessor.]

B2 Organize bottom-up research effort (design questionnaires and contact participants)

B3 Collect bottom-up research from customers using product mock-ups

B4 Choose product name, branding, package design

B5 Legal department sign-off on branding and trademarks

B6 Final testing with customers

B7 Customer feedback cycle complete [Milestone]

B8 Perform pricing-and-sales volume analysis

B9 Plan test market strategy

B10 Run test market

B11 Construct pro forma financial projections on product impact on profits

B12 Finalize national marketing plan

C. Advertising and promotional activities

C1 After the initial bottom-up research is complete, develop promotional and advertising strategies

C2 Develop specific promotional plans

C3 Meet with advertising agency

C4 After legal sign-off on branding, finalize TV and web advertising materials

C5 Print advertising materials for trade shows

D. PRODUCT LAUNCH [Milestone]

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