During the morning of Wednesday, June 23, 2004, Lori Anne McNulty, senior manager

of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, received a panicked call from Sarah Mann,
the supervisor of fundraising events. A major fundraising event, the MS bicycle tour
between London and Grand Bend, Ontario, was scheduled for July 24 and 25. Mann
was completing a final drive of the route, four weeks before the event, when she
realized that the road construction would not be completed in time for the event. With
the route planning activities usually requiring 59 days to complete, McNulty wondered
whether they would be able to find a safe, paved route and complete the planning
activities before the scheduled event.

Prepare a network diagram for the bicycle route planning, using MS Project. Please
submit your MS Project file using Canvas.
Please also prepare and submit a Word document that addresses the following
questions:
1. What is the critical path for the route planning, in the most likely scenario? What can
you conclude from your analysis?
Based on Network diagram in the MS project, The critical path would be : -
a. ABDEFGHILNOQRS
b. ABDEFGHKLNOQRS
c. ABDEFGHILMPQRS
d. ABDEFGHKMPQRS

Analysis:
The overall duration for the project (under most likely condition) is 52.6 days.
Based on the Network diagram, (attached above), there are few tasks which are in parallel
to other tasks and taking equal time. This results in multiple critical paths. To reduce the
overall project times, it would become necessary to reduce the duration for both tasks
which are in parallel. Otherwise, reducing the duration of one, won’t have any effect on
the project timelines.
2. When is the earliest completion time in the optimistic and pessimistic
scenarios? What conclusions can be drawn from this analysis?

Under optimistic scenario; critical path becomes:

A(B,C)DEFGHILNOQRS - with overall duration of 32.6 days

Under Pessimistic scenario; critical path becomes:

ABDEFGHIL(NO/MP)QRS – with overall duration of 85.1days.

As stated above, completion of route planning tasks will take a total of 53 days at an
average, which is lesser than 59 days mentioned in the case. Also, optimistic time of 32.6
days is calculated by taking the earliest finish period for each of the tasks required in the
route planning activity. It is still more than 23 days, which is the number of days required
in the start of bicycle tour. Thus, it is not possible to finish the tasks before the start of the
tour. We therefore wither need to change the cycling route or alter the manpower involved
in the planning activities.
3. As Lori Anne McNulty, how would you manage the uncertainty in the task duration
times?
Establishing contingency plans can help managing the uncertainties in task-duration time.
Management of idle-time is a critical factor in managing uncertainties. Control mechanism
and monitoring leads can manage slack. We can also manage uncertainties by managing
deliverables instead of directly managing the task.
4. What strategies would you use to complete the bicycle route planning by July 24?
Please be creative as you think about this question.
At this point, we should minimize the time of activities that are less prior so that it may
become able to finish the route planning before 24 July. Activities B and C can be done
simultaneously as these activities take minimum expected time of 9 days. So these
activities can be crashed from route planning. Doing so will reduce the time of the
completion of task and team can focus on the critical path activities of the route planning
activities.
Another option we can consider is to add more resources which will add more cost to the
project but can further reduce the durations of tasks and help meeting the deadline.