Week 5 Review Questions
March 2, 2013

1. The project manager’s primary attention must be on activities that are on the project’s critical path because if there is any delay at all, it would cause the project to be delivered late. 2. For any activities on the critical path, there is zero amount of slack. For activities not on the critical path, the slack is calculated by subtracting the ES (earliest start) from the LS (latest start) or by subtracting the EF (earliest finish) from the LF (latest finish). 3. To determine the ES for a item with 2 predecessors, the project manager should look at each predecessor to see if either one of them or both of them are on the critical path. The ES is the later of the 2 predecessor’s LF. The LF for an activity with 2 successors is determined by looking at each successor’s LS and determining which one has an earlier LS. 4. All the activities on the project’s non-critical path will not have the same slack because each of them can have different predecessors and different successors and different timeframes. 5. A. 4 B. 2 & 3 C. 5 6. Dummy tasks are used in situations where 2 activities have the same starting and ending nodes to make sure to be able to distinguish between the activities and not have the 2 activities be considered the same activity. 7. Because task d is only 6 days and task c is over double than task d so we can safely assume that a merge problem won’t occur because in all likelihood, task d will be done well ahead of task c therefore not causing any concerns with task f. 8. When a resource that has slack from working on a non-critical path activity can be used to help other resources who are working on critical path activities shorten the timeframe of the critical path’s activity and the project end date remains the same, that is what is known as “project slack”. Project