Q1: Provide Mr Alexopoulos with a project schedule including the Network Diagram and Gantt chart. Your report should show the critical activities as well as Total and Free Slack for each activity.

Table 1 presents the project schedule accompanied with the total cost for the project, the duration and both the free and total slack columns.
Table 1 Initial project schedule

Figure 1 illustrates how the activities from table 1 will be scheduled across time, in the form of a Gantt chart.
Figure 1 Gantt chart for initial schedule
Figure 1 Gantt chart for initial schedule

Figure 2 demonstrates the several “paths” formed by the activities sequence, in a network diagram. Highlighted in red is the critical path, consisted by the critical activities A, D & G. The total duration of the critical path, which at the same time is the total duration of the project, is 12 weeks as seen in table 1 while the total cost of the project is estimated to be at € 61,000.00.

Figure 2 Network diagram for initial schedule
Table 2 presents the activity paths for the initial schedule. Due to free slack in activities B, E & F, the non-critical paths have a slack of 2 to 4 weeks, which provides a greater flexibility in resource commitment and use for these stated activities.

Path 1 | A | D | G | 12 weeks (critical path) | | 3 weeks | 5 weeks | 4 weeks | | Path 2 | B | G | | 10 weeks | | 6 weeks | 4 weeks | | | Path 3 | C | E | G | 8 weeks | | 2 weeks | 2 weeks | 4 weeks | | Path 4 | A | F | | 10 weeks | | 3 weeks | 7 weeks | | |
Table 2 Activity paths and respective durations for initial schedule

Q2: The project turns out to be time critical and Mr Alexopoulos wants to complete it with 10 weeks. Provide a crashing schedule that completes the project in 10 weeks, keeping extra costs to the lowest possible level. Indicate the new cost and