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8.6 Exercises

Exercises at the end of the chapter are designed to strengthen your understanding and retention of the information recently acquired in the chapter.

Essay Questions

Write several paragraphs to provide more in-depth analysis and consideration when answering the following questions.

  1. Compare the Gantt and Network charts. Describe the uses of each type of chart.
  2. Choose a project with which you are familiar (it could be a simple project like John’s move) and describe how the project could be crashed using each of the methods described in the text.
  3. Describe what size project could be done using general purpose word processing and spreadsheet software and how you could structure the data in those documents to make it easier to transfer that data into a project management software, if necessary.

Discussion

The exercises in this section are designed to promote exchange of information among students in the classroom or in an online discussion. The exercises are more open ended, which means that what you find might be completely different from what your classmates find, and you can all benefit by sharing what you have learned.

  1. Describe a personal experience where the average amount of work required of you was appropriate but the scheduling of that work was so uneven that there were periods when you could not get the work done on time and other periods when you did not have enough to do. Describe how you would have used resource leveling and free float to distribute your workload if you had been the manager. Consider the situations and solutions offered by classmates and suggest other ways they could have distributed their workloads more evenly.
  2. Describe your experience working with a spreadsheet to manage data such as expenses or activities. How would the ability to treat them like data by sorting and filtering help you to prepare reports?