22MCA421 IT Project management

Module-4 : ACTIVITY PLANNING AND RISK MANAGEMENT

Objectives of Activity planning – Project schedules – Activities – Sequencing and scheduling –

Network Planning models – Formulating Network Model – Forward Pass & Backward Pass
techniques – Critical path (CRM) method – Risk identification – Assessment – Risk Planning –
Risk Management – – PERT technique – Monte Carlo simulation – Resource Allocation –
Creation of critical paths – Cost schedules.

Book :Bob Hughes, Mike Cotterell and Rajib Mall: Software Project Management – Fifth
Edition, Tata McGraw Hill, NewDelhi, 2012.

Module-4: ACTIVITY PLANNING AND RISK MANAGEMENT

This talk provides an overview of the basic steps needed to produce a project plan. The
framework provided should allow students to identify where some of the particular issues
discussed in other chapters are applied to the planning process. As the focus is on project
planning, techniques to do with project control are not explicitly described. However, in practice,
one element of project planning will be to decide what project control procedures need to be in
place.

4.1 The Objectives of Activity Planning

Activity planning aims to achieve a number of other objectives which may be summarized as
follows.
• Feasibility assessment: - Is the project possible within required timescale and
resource constraints? However, it is not until we have constructed a detailed plan that we
can forecast a completion date with any reasonable knowledge of its achievability.

• Resource allocation: - What are the most effective ways of allocating resources to the
project. When should the resources be available? The project plan allows us to
investigate relation between timescales and resource availability (in general, allocating
additional resources to the project shortens its duration) and the efficacy of additional
spending on resource procurement.

• Detailed costing: - How much will the project cost and when is that expenditure likely
to take place? After producing an activity plan and allocating specific resources we
can obtain more detailed estimates of costs and their timing.

• Motivation: - Providing targets and being seen to monitor achievements against the
targets is an effective way of motivating staff. Particularly where they have been
involved in setting those targets in the first place.

• Coordination: - When do the staffs in different department needs to be available to

work on a particular project and when do staffs need to be transformed between projects?

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The project plan, particularly with large project involving more than a single project
team.

• Provides an effective vehicle for communication and coordination among.

4.2 Project Schedules

• The project plan must be developed to the level of showing dates when each activity
should start and finish and when and how much of each resource will be required.

• Once the plan has been refined to this level of detail we call it a project schedule.

• A project schedule comprises four main stages.

• The first step in producing the plan is to decide what activities need to be carried
out and in what order they are to be done. From this we can construct an ideal
activity plan – that is, a plan of when each activity would ideally be undertaken
were resources not a constraint.

• The ideal activity plan will then be the subject of an activity risk analysis, aimed
at identifying potential problems. This might suggest alterations to the ideal
activity plan and will almost certainly have implications for resource allocation.

• The third step is resource allocation. The expected availability of resources

might place constraints on when certain activities can be carried out, and our ideal
plan might need to be adapted to take account of this.

• The final step is schedule production. Once resources have been allocated to
each activity, we will be in a position to draw up and publish a project schedule,
which indicates planned start and completion dates and a resource requirements
statement for each activity.

4.3 Projects and Activities

• Before we try to identify the activities that make up a project it is worth reviewing what
we mean by a project and its activities and adding some assumptions that will be
relevant when we start to produce an activity plan.
• A project is composed of a number of interrelated activities.
• A project may start when at least one of its activities is ready to start.
• A project will be completed when all of the activities it encompasses have been
completed.

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• An activity must have a clearly defined start and a clearly defined end-point,
normally marked by the production of a tangible deliverable.
• If an activity requires a resource (as most do) then that resource requirement must
be forecastable and is assumed to be required at a constant level throughout the
duration of the activity.
• The duration of an activity must be forecastable – assuming normal
circumstances, and the reasonable availability of resources.
• Some activities might require that others are completed before they can begin
(these are known as precedence requirements).

4.3.1 Identifying activities

• Essentially there are three approaches to identifying the activities or tasks that make up a
project – we shall call them the
• activity-based approach,
• the product-based approach and
• the hybrid approach.
[Link] The activity-based approach
• The activity-based approach consists of creating a list of all the activities that the project
is thought to involve.
• This might require a brainstorming session involving the whole project team or it might
stem from an analysis
• of similar past projects.
• When listing activities, particularly for a large project, it might be helpful to subdivide
the project into the main life-cycle stages and consider each of these separately.
• Rather than doing this in an ad hoc manner, with the obvious risks of omitting or
double-counting tasks, a much favoured way of generating a task list is to create a Work
Breakdown Structure (WBS)
• This involves identifying the main (or high-level) tasks required to complete a project
and then breaking each of these down into a set of lower-level tasks.

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[Link] The product-based approach

• It consists of producing a Product Breakdown Structure and a Product Flow Diagram.
• The PFD indicates, for each product, which other products are required as inputs.
• The PFD can therefore be easily transformed into an ordered list of activities by
identifying the transformations that turn some products into others.

[Link] The hybrid approach

• A framework dictating the number of levels and the nature of each level in the structure
may be imposed on a WBS.
• For example, in their MITP methodology, IBM recommend that the following five levels
should be used in a WBS:
• Level 1: Project.
• Level 2: Deliverables such as software, manuals and training courses.
• Level 3: Components, which are the key work items needed to produce
deliverables, such as the modules and tests required to produce the system
software.
• Level 4: Work-packages, which are major work items, or collections of related
tasks, required to produce a component.
• Level 5: Tasks, which are tasks that will normally be the responsibility of a single
person.

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4.4 Sequencing and Scheduling Activities

Throughout a project, we will require a schedule that clearly indicates when each of the
project’s activities is planned to occur and what resources it will need.

 The chart shown has been drawn up taking account of the nature of the development
process (that is, certain tasks must be completed before others may start) and the
resources that are available (for example, activity C follows activity B because Andy
cannot work on both tasks at the same time).
 The scheduling has had to take account of the availability of staff and the ways in which
the activities have been allocated to them.

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 The schedule might look quite different were there a different number of staff or were we
to allocate the activities differently.
 In the case of small projects, this combined sequencing–scheduling approach might be
quite suitable, particularly where we wish to allocate individuals to particular tasks at an
early planning stage.
 However, on larger projects it is better to separate out these two activities: to sequence
the tasks according to their logical relationships and then to schedule them taking into
account resources and other factors.
4.5 Network Planning Models
 These project scheduling techniques model the project’s activities and their relationships
as a network.
 In the network, time flows from left to right. These techniques were originally developed
in the 1950s – the two best known being CPM (Critical Path Method) and PERT
(Program Evaluation Review Technique).
 Both of these techniques used an activity-on-arrow approach to visualizing the project as
a network where activities are drawn as arrows joining circles, or nodes, which
represent the possible start and/or completion of an activity or set of activities.
 More recently a variation on these techniques, called precedence networks, has become
popular.
• More recently a variation on these techniques, called precedence networks, has become
popular.
• This method uses activity-on-node networks where activities are represented as nodes
and the links between nodes represent precedence (or sequencing) requirements.

4.6 Formulating a Network Model

 The first stage in creating a network model is to represent the activities and their
interrelationships as a graph.
 In activity-on-node we do this by representing activities as nodes (boxes) in the graph –
the lines between nodes represent dependencies.

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4.6.1 Constructing precedence networks

• A project network should have only one start node
• Although it is logically possible to draw a network with more than one starting
node, it is undesirable to do so as it is a potential source of confusion.
• It is normal to invent a ‘start’ activity which has zero duration but may have an
actual start date.

• A project network should have only one end node The end node designates the
completion of the project and a project may finish only once! Although it is
possible to draw a network with more than one end node, it will almost certainly
lead to confusion if this is done. Where the completion of a project depends upon
more than one ‘final’ activity it is normal to invent a ‘finish’ activity.
• A node has duration A node represents an activity and, in general, activities take
time to execute. Notice, however, that the network in Figure 6.7 does not contain
any reference to durations. This network drawing merely represents the logic of
the project – the rules governing the order in which activities are to be carried out.

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• Precedents are the immediate preceding activities In Figure 6.9, the activity ‘Program
test’ cannot start until both ‘Code’ and ‘Data take-on’ have been completed and activity
‘Instal’ cannot start until ‘Program test’ has finished. ‘Code‘ and ‘Data take-on’ can
therefore be said to be precedents of ‘Program test’, and ‘Program test’ is a precedent of
‘Instal’.
• Time moves from left to right If at all possible, networks are drawn so that time moves
from left to right.

• Precedents are the immediate preceding activities In Figure 6.9, the activity ‘Program
test’ cannot start until both ‘Code’ and ‘Data take-on’ have been completed and activity
‘Instal’ cannot start until ‘Program test’ has finished. ‘Code‘ and ‘Data take-on’ can
therefore be said to be precedents of ‘Program
• test’, and ‘Program test’ is a precedent of ‘Instal’.
• Time moves from left to right If at all possible, networks are drawn so that time moves
from left to right.

• A network may not contain loops Figure 6.10 demonstrates a loop in a network. A loop is
an error in that it represents a situation that cannot occur in practice. While loops, in the
sense of iteration, may occur in practice, they cannot be directly represented in a project
network. Note that the logic of Figure 6.10 suggests that program testing cannot start
until the errors have been corrected.

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• A network should not contain dangles A dangling activity such as ‘Write user manual’ in
Figure 6.11 should not exist as it is likely to lead to errors in subsequent analysis. Indeed,
in many cases dangling activities indicate errors in logic when activities are added as an
afterthought.
• If, in Figure 6.11, we mean to indicate that the project is complete once the software has
been installed and the user manual written then we should
• redraw the network with a fi nal completion activity – which, at least in this case, is
probably a more accurate representation of what should happen. The redrawn network is
shown in Figure 6.12.

4.6.2 Representing lagged activities

• We might come across situations where we wish to undertake two activities in
parallel so long as there is a lag between the two. We might wish to document
amendments to a program as it is being tested – particularly if evaluating a
prototype. In such a case we could designate an activity ‘test and document
amendments’. This would, however, make it impossible to show that amendment
recording could start, say, one day after testing had begun and finish a little after the
completion of testing.
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• Where activities can occur in parallel with a time lag between them, we represent
the lag with a duration on the linking arrow as shown in Figure 6.13. This indicates
that documenting amendments can start one day after the start of prototype testing
and will be completed two days after prototype testing is completed.

4.6.3 Hammock activities

• Hammock activities are activities which, in themselves, have zero duration but are
assumed to start at the same time as the first ‘hammocked’ activity and to end at the
same time as the last one.
• They are normally used for representing overhead costs or other resources that will
be incurred or used at a constant rate over the duration of a set of activities.

4.6.4 Labelling conventions

• There are a number of differing conventions that have been adopted for entering
information on an activity on-node network.
• The one adopted here is shown on the left and is based on the British Standard BS
4335.

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4. 7 The Forward Pass

• The forward pass is carried out to calculate the earliest dates on which each activity may
be started and completed.
• Where an actual start date is known, the calculations may be carried out using actual
dates.
• Alternatively we can use day or week numbers and that is the approach we shall adopt
here.
• Where an actual start date is known, the calculations may be carried out using actual
dates. Alternatively we can use day or week numbers and that is the approach we shall
adopt here. By convention, dates indicate the end of a period and the project is therefore
shown as starting at the end of week zero (or the beginning of week 1).

• Where an actual start date is known, the calculations may be carried out using actual
dates. Alternatively we can use day or week numbers and that is the approach we shall
adopt here. By convention, dates indicate the end of a period and the project is therefore
shown as starting at the end of week zero (or the beginning of week 1).
• The forward pass and the calculation of earliest start dates are carried out according to the
following reasoning..
o Activities A, B and F may start immediately, so the earliest date for their start is
zero.
o Activity A will take 6 weeks, so the earliest it can finish is week 6.
o Activity B will take 4 weeks, so the earliest it can finish is week 4.
o Activity F will take 10 weeks, so the earliest it can finish is week 10.

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– Activity C can start as soon as A has finished so its earliest start date is week 6. It
will take 3 weeks so the earliest it can finish is week 9.
– Activities D and E can start as soon as B is complete so the earliest they can each
start is week 4.
– Activity D, which will take 4 weeks, can therefore finish by week 8 and activity
E, which will take 3 weeks, can therefore finish by week 7.
– Activity G cannot start until both E and F have been completed. It cannot
therefore start until week 10 – the later of weeks 7 (for activity E) and 10 (for
activity F). It takes 3 weeks and finishes in week 13.
– Similarly, Activity H cannot start until week 9 – the later of the two earliest finish
dates for the preceding activities C and D.
– The project will be complete when both activities H and G have been completed.
Thus the earliest project completion date will be the later of weeks 11 and 13 –
that is, week 13.
– The results of the forward pass are shown in Figure 6.15.

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4.7 The Backward Pass

• The second stage in the analysis of a critical path network is to carry out a backward pass
to calculate the latest date at which each activity may be started and finished without
delaying the end date of the project.
• In calculating the latest dates, we assume that the latest finish date for the project is the
same as the earliest finish date – that is, we wish to complete the project as early as
possible.
• Figure 6.16 illustrates our network after carrying out the backward pass. The latest activity
dates are calculated as follows.
• The latest completion date for activities G and H is assumed to be week 13.
• Activity H must therefore start at week 11 at the latest (13 – 2) and the latest start
date for activity G is week 10 (13 – 3).
• The latest completion date for activities G and H is assumed to be week 13.
• Activity H must therefore start at week 11 at the latest (13 – 2) and the latest start
date for activity G is week 10 (13 – 3).
• The latest completion date for activities C and D is the latest date at which activity
H must start – that is, week 11. They therefore have latest start dates of week 8 (11 –
3) and week 7 (11 – 4) respectively.

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• Activities E and F must be completed by week 10 so their earliest start dates are
weeks 7 (10 – 3) and 0 (10 – 10) respectively.
• Activity B must be completed by week 7 (the latest start date for both activities D
and E) so its latest start is week 3 (7 – 4).
• Activity A must be completed by week 8 (the latest start date for activity C) so its
latest start is week 2 (8 – 6).
• The latest start date for the project start is the earliest of the latest start dates for
activities A, B and F.
• This is week zero. This is, of course, not very surprising since it tells us that if the
project does not start on time it won’t finish on time.

The Backward Pass

4.8 Identifying the Critical Path

 There will be at least one path through the network (that is, one set of successive
activities) that defines the duration of the project. This is known as the critical
path.
 Any delay to any activity on this critical path will delay the completion of the
project.
 The difference between an activity’s earliest start date and its latest start date is
known as the activity’s float.

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 Any activity with a float of zero is critical in the sense that any delay in carrying
out the activity will delay the completion date of the project as a whole.

4.8.1 The significance of the critical path is two-fold.

 In managing the project, we must pay particular attention to monitoring activities

on the critical path so that the effects of any delay or resource unavailability are
detected and corrected at the earliest opportunity.

 In planning the project, it is the critical path that we must shorten if we are to reduce
the overall duration of the project.

 Figure 6.17 also shows the activity span. This is the difference between the earliest
start date and the latest finish date and is a measure of the maximum time allowable
for the activity. However, it is subject to the same conditions of interpretation as
activity fl oat, which is discussed in the next section.

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RISK MANAGEMENT
 Risk as ‘an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative
effect on a project’s objectives’.

4.9 Risk Identification

 The two main approaches to the identification of risks are the use of checklists and
brainstorming.
 Checklists are simply lists of the risks that have been found to occur regularly in
software development projects.

 Specialized list of software development risks by Barry Boehm appears in Table 7.1 in
a modified version. Ideally a group of representative project stakeholders examines a
checklist identifying risks applicable to their project. Often the checklist suggests
potential countermeasures for each risk.

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4.9.1 Brainstorming
 Ideally, representatives of the main stakeholders should be brought together once
some kind of preliminary plan has been drafted.
 They then identify, using their individual knowledge of different parts of the project,
the problems that might occur. This collaborative approach may generate a sense of
ownership in the project.
4.10 Risk Assessment
 A common problem with risk identification is that a list of risks is potentially endless.
 A way is needed of distinguishing the damaging and likely risks.
 This can be done by estimating the risk exposure for each risk using the formula:
risk exposure = (potential damage) X (probability of occurrence)
• The risk exposure in this case would be:
£500,000 X 3 0.001 = £500
The calculation of risk exposure above assumes that the amount of damage sustained will
always be the same.

Figure 7.3. This shows the probability of a task being completed in four days (5%), then
five days (10%), and so on. The accumulated probability for the seventh day (65%) means
that there is a 65% chance that the task will be finished on or before the seventh day.

• Clients would almost certainly insist we pick one of the days as the target.
• This target could be ‘aggressive’, for instance only five days in the above scenario, but
with an 85% chance of failure according to the chart.

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Table 7.2 provides an example, based on Amanda’s IOE group accounts project, of where this
has been done. This value could be used to prioritize the importance of risks, although more
sophisticated risk calculations are not possible.

Another approach is to use qualitative descriptions of the possible impact and the likelihood of
each risk – see Tables 7.3 and 7.4 for examples.

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In Table 7.4, the potential amount of damage has been categorized in terms of its impact on
project costs. Other tables could show the impact of risks on project duration or on the quality of
the project deliverables.

4.11 Risk Planning

Having identified the major risks and allocated priorities, the task is to decide how to deal with
them.
The choices discussed will be:
 risk acceptance;
 risk avoidance;
 risk reduction and mitigation;
 risk transfer.

4.11.1 Risk acceptance

• This is the do-nothing option. We will already, in the risk prioritization process, have
decided to ignore some risks in order to concentrate on the more likely or damaging.
4.11.2 Risk avoidance
• Some activities may be so prone to accident that it is best to avoid them altogether.
• If you are worried about sharks then don’t go into the water.
4.11.3 Risk reduction
• Here we decide to go ahead with a course of action despite the risks, but take precautions
that reduce the probability of the risk.

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4.11.4 Risk transfer

• In this case the risk is transferred to another person or organization.
• With software projects, an example of this would be where a software development task
is outsourced to an outside agency for a fixed fee.
4.12 Risk Management
4.12.1 Contingency
 Risk reduction activities would appear to have only a small impact on reducing the
probability of some risks, for example staff absence through illness.
 While some employers encourage their employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle, it remains
likely that some project team members will at some point be brought down by minor
illnesses such as flu. These kinds of risk need a contingency plan.
4.12.2 Deciding on the risk actions
 For each actual risk, however, specific actions have to be planned.
 In many cases experts have produced lists recommending practical steps to cope with the
likelihood of particular risks;
 the cost-effectiveness of a risk reduction action can be assessed by calculating the risk
reduction leverage (RRL).
risk reduction leverage = (REbefore – REafter)/(cost of risk reduction)
 An RRL above 1.00 indicates that the reduction in risk exposure achieved by a measure is
greater than its cost.
4.12.3 Creating and maintaining the risk register
When the project planners have picked out and examined what appear to be the most
threatening risks to the project, they need to record their findings in a risk register.

4.13 Applying the PERT Technique

4.13.1 Using PERT to evaluate the effects of uncertainty
 PERT was developed to take account of the uncertainty surrounding estimates of task
durations.
 It was developed in an environment of expensive, high-risk and state-of-the-art projects
– not that dissimilar to many of today’s large software projects.

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 PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique)

 PERT requires three estimates.
o Most likely time: the time we would expect the task to take under normal
circumstances. We shall identify this by the letter m.
o Optimistic time: the shortest time in which we could expect to complete the
activity, barring outright miracles. We shall use the letter a for this.
o Pessimistic time: the worst possible time, allowing for all reasonable
eventualities but excluding ‘acts of God and warfare’ (as they say in most
insurance exclusion clauses). We shall call this b.

4.13.2 Using expected durations

– The expected durations are used to carry out a forward pass through a network,
using the same method as the CPM technique.
– In this case, however, the calculated event dates are not the earliest possible dates
but the dates by which we expect to achieve those events.
– The PERT network illustrated in Figure 7.6 indicates that we expect the project to
take 13.5 weeks. In Figure 7.6 we have used an activity-on-arrow network as this
form of presentation makes it easier to separate visually the estimated activity
data (expected durations and, later, their standard deviations) from the calculated
data (expected completion dates and target completion dates). The method can, of
course, be equally well supported by activity-on-node diagrams.

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• An advantage of this approach is that it places an emphasis on the uncertainty of the real
world.
• Rather than being tempted to say ‘the completion date for the project is. . .’ we are led to
say ‘we expect to complete the project by. . .’.
• It also focuses attention on the uncertainty of the estimation of activity durations.

4.13.3 Activity standard deviations

• A quantitative measure of the degree of uncertainty of an activity duration estimate may
be obtained by calculating the standard deviation s of an activity time, using the formula
• S=b-a/6

4.13.4 The likelihood of meeting targets

– The main advantage of the PERT technique is that it provides a method for
estimating the probability of meeting or missing target dates.
– There might be only a single target date – the project completion – but we might
wish to set additional intermediate targets.
– Suppose that we must complete the project within 15 weeks at the outside. We
expect it will take 13.5 weeks but it could take more or, perhaps, less.
– In addition, suppose that activity C must be completed by week 10, as it is to be
carried out by a member of staff who is scheduled to be working on another
project, and that event 5 represents the delivery of intermediate products to the
customer, which must take place by week 10.

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These three target dates are shown on the PERT network in Figure 7.7.
The PERT technique uses the following three-step method for calculating the probability of
meeting or missing a target date:
● calculate the standard deviation of each project event;
● calculate the z value for each event that has a target date;
● convert z values to a probabilities.

4.13.5 Calculating the standard deviation of each project event

• Standard deviations for the project events can be calculated by carrying out a forward
pass using the activity standard deviations in a manner similar to that used with expected
durations.
• There is, however, one small difference – to add two standard deviations we must add
their squares and then find the square root of the sum.

4.13.6 Calculating the z values

– The z value is calculated for each node that has a target date.
– It is equivalent to the number of standard deviations between the node’s expected
and target dates. It is calculated using the formula.

4.13.7 The advantages of PERT

 We have seen that by requesting multi-valued activity duration estimates and
calculating expected dates, PERT focuses attention on the uncertainty of
forecasting.

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 We can use the technique to calculate the standard deviation for each task and use
this to rank them according to their degree of risk.
 by setting target dates along the critical path, we can focus on those activities
posing the greatest risk to the project’s schedule.

4.14 Monte Carlo simulation

As an alternative to the PERT technique, we can use Monte Carlo simulation approach.
 Monte Carlo simulation are a class of general analysis techniques that are
valuable to solve any problem that is complex, nonlinear, or involves more than
just a couple of uncertain parameters.
 The main steps involved in carrying out Monte Carlo simulation for a project
consisting of n activities are as follows:
 Step 1: Express the project completion time in terms of the duration of the n
activities (xi, i=1, n and their dependences as a precedence graph, d = f(x1, x2,
... , xn).
 Step 2: Generate a set of random inputs, xi1, xi2, .... , xin using specified
probability distributions.
 Step 3: Evaluate the project completion time expression and store the result in di.
 Step 4: Repeat Steps 2 and 3 for the specified number of times.
 Step 5: Analyze the results di, i=1,n ; summarize and display using a histogram
as the one shown in Figure 7.9.

 Monte Carlo simulation is expected to give a more realistic result than manual analysis of
a few cases, especially because manual analysis implicitly gives equal weights to all
scenarios.

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4.15 Creating Critical Paths

 Scheduling resources can create new critical paths. Delaying the start of an activity
because of lack of resources will cause that activity to become critical if this uses up its
float.
 Furthermore, a delay in completing one activity can delay the availability of a resource
required for a later activity.
 If the later one is already critical then the earlier one might now have been made critical
by linking their resources.

4.16 Cost Schedules

– It is now time to produce a detailed cost schedule showing weekly or monthly costs over
the life of the project.
– This will provide a more detailed and accurate estimate of costs and will serve as a plan
against which project progress can be monitored.
– Calculating cost is straightforward where the organization has standard cost figures for
staff and other resources.
– Where this is not the case, then the project manager will have to calculate the costs.
– In general, costs are categorized as follows.
– Staff costs These will include staff salaries as well as the other direct costs of
employment such as the employer’s contribution to social security funds, pension scheme
contributions, holiday pay and sickness benefit. These are commonly charged to projects
at hourly rates based on weekly work records completed by staff. Note that contract staff
are usually charged by the week or month – even when they are idle.
– Overheads Overheads represent expenditure that an organization incurs, which cannot
be directly related to individual projects or jobs, including space rental, interest charges
and the costs of service departments (such as human resources).
– Overhead costs can be recovered by making a fixed charge on development
departments or by an additional percentage charge on direct staff employment costs.
These additional charges or on-costs can easily equal or exceed the direct employment
costs.

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– Usage charges In some organizations, projects are charged directly for use of resources
such as computer time (rather than their cost being recovered as an overhead). This will
normally be on an ‘as used’ basis.

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QUESTIONS
1. What are the key objectives of activity planning in a project? Explain. (10M)(L2)
2. What are the four main stages involved in producing a project schedule? (10M) (L2)
3. Analyze the differences between the activity-based approach and the product-based
approach for identifying activities in a project. How might each approach impact the
overall project plan and schedule? (10M) (L4)
4. What is the importance of considering resource availability when creating a project
schedule? (10M) (L2)
5. Explain the importance of avoiding loops and dangling activities in a project network
model, and describe how hammock activities are used to represent overhead costs.
(10M) (L2)
6. Explain the process of the forward pass in project scheduling. Use the example
provided to calculate the earliest start and finish dates for each activity, and discuss
how these calculations contribute to determining the project's earliest completion date.
(10M) (L3)
7. Describe the purpose of the backward pass in project scheduling. Using the example
provided, explain how the backward pass calculates the latest start and finish dates for
activities, and discuss its significance in determining the project's flexibility and critical
path. (10M) (L2)
8. Analyze how identifying the critical path in a project management network can
influence project planning and execution.(L3)(10M)
9. Evaluate the effectiveness of using checklists versus brainstorming for identifying risks
in software development projects.(L2)( 10M)
10. How would you prioritize risks in a software development project using both
quantitative and qualitative methods? (L3) (10M)
11. How can the PERT technique be utilized to evaluate and manage the uncertainties in a
project schedule, and what are the steps involved in calculating the probability of
meeting target dates? (L4) (10M)

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Dr. Praveen Banasode Dept. of MCA, JCE Belagavi Page 28