TYPICAL EXAMINATION QUESTIONS

Question 1 You have been asked to lead a project to develop a teaching facility for
postgraduate students in an existing building currently occupied by a commercial organisation.

a) i) Write an appropriate project statement and project objectives.

ii) In reality you would involve other parties in developing the project statement and
objectives. Who would you include and why?

b) Identify four risks to which the project would be exposed and briefly describe how you
would manage the risks identified.

c) How would you define quality for this project? Give four ways in which you would plan to
achieve this quality.

Question 2 It is proposed to extend an existing factory which manufactures steel building

products, to install some additional equipment to manufacture steel house frames and to
erect a new sales office in the factory building. The activities which make up the project
are shown in below.
Activity Duration (working days)
Order and take delivery of new equipment 15
Design building extension 10
Prepare site and excavate foundations 7
Pour foundations and concrete slab floor 15
Erect frame for building extension 8
Clad building extension 5
Locate new sales office in building extension 8
Install equipment 9
Commission equipment 5

a) Determine the dependencies between activities from the following information:

The new equipment is to go in the existing building and therefore can be delivered and
installed simultaneously with the design and construction of the building extension.
However, the new equipment is not to be commissioned until the building extension is
clad.

The design and construction of the building extension should follow the order indicated
in the table above. Once the extension is clad the new sales office can be put in place.

b) Draw an activity on the arrow diagram for the project indicating the critical path.

c) Draw a precedence diagram also indicating the critical path and indicating on the
diagram for each activity the earliest and latest start and finish times, the duration and
the float.

d) Draw a Gantt chart (bar chart) for the project.

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Question 3

a. How does a Research and Development project differ from a Construction or

Manufacturing project in terms of the challenges to the project manager?

b. Give three forms of organisational structure that are used in project

organisations and give the advantages and disadvantages of each as far as a
commercial Research and Development organisation is concerned.

c. Give, with reasons, what you see as the four most important dimensions of the
position of project leader for a major Research and Development project in such
an organisation.

Question 4

The budgeted cost at completion (BAC) for each of the 1.5 activities that make up a project is
shown in Table 2. All activities up to activity 1 0 are due to have been completed. The
percentage of work actually completed for each activity is indicated in the table below, as is the
actual cost of work performed (ACWP) on each activity.

Activity 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
BAC ($k) 10 10 25 35 35 50 60 70 85 90 70 50 40 20 10
% complete 100 100 100 100 100 70 50 50 0 20 0 0 0 0 0
ACWP($k) 15 10 25 40 35 35 25 30 0 20 0 0 0 0 0

a) Develop a table showing the schedule variance, cost variance and estimate at completion for
each activity and estimate the cost by which the project will be over or under budget at
completion.

b) What assumptions have you had to make about the activities that have not yet started?
Are these assumptions justified by the performance of the project to date?

c) From the figures that have been presented to you what would you say is the major
problem facing the project manager? What actions would you recommend to overcome
this problem?