Woody Project Planning and Scheduling

Woody

Project Planning And Scheduling

Woody2000: Case study in project planning and scheduling

Woody2000: Case study

Identify and describe a set of project schedule milestones from project concept to project completion.

The Woody 2000 project involves fundamental infrastructure reforms needed for the Custom Woodworking Company ('Woody's'), to become more future-oriented, competitive, and to take advantage of time-sensitive opportunities (Wideman, 1993, The Project Concept).

Necessary schedule milestones include:

Project pre-planning, including market research and environmental analysis to determine the most critical and cost-efficient means of modernizing the factory

Finding the 'right' (competent yet not overly expensive) contractors and sub-contractors to deal with project demands

Expanding additional production capacity by 25% of the existing floor area

Installing air-conditioning

Building a dust-free paint and finishing shop complete with additional compressor capacity.

Building a semi-automatic woodworking production train

Developing and installing software and hardware to run the production train

Renovating Woody's President and Executive Vice Presidents' offices

Scheduling regular meetings with contractors to ensure the project is going on according to schedule, and to reframe and regroup plans if necessary.

While the renovation of the offices could be postponed or more easily coordinated with the other initiatives, the currently scheduled renovations must be done in a more time-sensitive manner as they are dependent upon one another. For example, expanding production capacity of the existing floor area is required to build the new finishing shop. Air-conditioning can only be fully installed after the production capacity is expanded and the new shop is built. The energy and ventilation demands of the new structure must be properly understood, although some pre-planning is possible to minimize time delays. The new software is designed to run the production train, so work on the new computer system must be constructed in conjunction with work on the production train. Both must be fully operational at the same time, although some pre-planning should be done on the computer system -- again to minimize time delays.

Q2. Illustrate your milestones on a simple bar chart scaled to the information provided in the case study

The first phase of the project development is clearing the site, to be accomplished within 4 or 5 months (Wideman, 1993, Startup). Once this is accomplished, construction of the new shop and expanding the production floor space should begin in earnest, with a set completion date of 18 months. During the clean-up, preliminary plans for the software and air conditioning and dust-free ventilation system should be laid, although these may need to be refined during the actual production process. Also, some delays should be built into the plan, such as trouble-shooting the new train.

Q3. Would a good baseline plan have helped to show that the project would not meet its schedule? If so, how?

Not necessarily. The initial target date for the completion of the project's production was eighteen months from the initial date. However, to fulfill the project demands, the contracted entity Expert Industrial Developers EID also subcontracted a number of individuals, including Schemers and Plotters (S&P) for the building and industrial design work (Wideman, 1993, Planning). Even a good plan cannot account for all subcontracting-related delays. Intuitively it might seem that a plan of such magnitude could not be completed on time, at least not with so many subcontractors. When in doubt, common sense should 'win out' when allowing for delays.

The only conceivable way for a good baseline plan to have accounted for more contingencies within the project would be to work with all subcontractors involved on the various projects and create a master timeline. Provided the contractors were honest about the real deadlines for their deliverables, the various arms of the project could have been better-coordinated. The time-sensitive nature of the project, designed to take advantage of a critical business opportunity suggests it may have been too ambitious to do the company real financial good, and a more feasible and moderate production line expansion might have better achieved the designed goal.

Better coordination would not necessarily have improved the final results given the incompetence show by Woody's lower-level managers. Miscommunications were rife amongst critical organizational actors. It was not simply that the deadlines were unclear or that there were delays in material delivery -- individuals designed to make authoritative decisions were effectively 'asleep at the wheel.' For example, when two of the company's executives were on vacation, manufacturing drawings for long-lead equipment awaited approval. There was no contingency plan for a junior official to approve the plans, nor was anyone contacted to sign the papers. The delay was two weeks, but the time costs to the project were far greater, as one delay lead to another and another, as so many of the projects were dependent upon one another's completion (Wideman, 1993, Design).