CHAPTER 7
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
SOLUTIONS TO DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
7-1. PERT and CPM can answer a number of questions about a project or the activities within a project.
These techniques can determine the earliest start, earliest finish, latest start, and the latest finish times for
7-2. There are several major differences between PERT and CPM. With PERT, three estimates of activity
time and completion are made. These are the optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic time estimates. From
7-4. Expected activity times and variances can be computed by making the assumption that activity times
7-5. The critical path consists of those activities that will cause a delay in the entire project if they
themselves are delayed. These critical path activities have zero slack. If they are delayed, the entire
7-6. The earliest activity start time is the earliest time that an activity can be started after all predecessor
activities are completely finished. The earliest activity start times are determined using a forward pass
7-7. Slack is the amount of time that an activity can be delayed without delaying the entire project. If the
7-8. We can determine the probability that a project will be completed by a certain date by knowing the
expected project completion time and variance. The expected project completion time can be determined
7-9. This can be done by making a budget for the entire project using the activity cost estimates and by
7-10. Crashing is the process of reducing the total time it takes to complete a project by expending
additional resources. In performing crashing by hand, it is necessary to identify those activities along the
7-11. Linear programming is very useful in CPM crashing because it is a commonly used technique and