Analysis of Victoria Construction Project Management Strategies

This project management assignment analyzes a case study involving Victoria Construction, focusing on the application of the Critical Path Method (CPM) to manage project duration. The project, aimed at developing a system for environmental monitoring and data management, is estimated to take 88.4 weeks. The assignment details the critical path, identifies the impact of annual holidays on project timelines, and explores strategies to reduce the project's overall duration by three weeks. The analysis highlights the importance of focusing on critical path tasks to efficiently manage time and cost, emphasizing the role of project managers in applying various techniques to ensure project success. The assignment references key project management literature, including works by Kerzner, Nicholas and Steyn, and others, to support its findings and recommendations.

Project

Project Management is one of the important approach for managing different types of
project in effective manner. It plays important role in developing project plans and showing
relationship among different activities in effective manner (Nicholas and Steyn, 2017). The
current research project is based on a project in which Victoria Construction Pty Ltd has been
planned to develop a system for environmental monitoring and collecting data and prepare a
data base management in the head office. This project will take 88.4 weeks to complete. Start
date is 1st June 2016 and Finish date is 8th February 2018. Therefore, it will be a big and very
long project for the organization (Fleming and Koppelman, 2016).
Project manager can use different methods and techniques for estimating the total
duration of the project (Chevrier, 2016). Critical Path Method is one of the best way to
estimate the project time. It helps in finding the minimum duration and longest path of the
project. So, as per the MS project calculation critical path of this project is 88.4 weeks
(Turner, 2016). Critical path calculation is as follows:
Critical Path Activities Critical Duration
2-9-10-25-26-29-43-44-47-49-50-48-45-
46-60-68-69-70-71-72-75-76-77-78-79-80-82
88.4 weeks
Annual holidays make difference to the end of the date of the project around 5 days
because within the holiday time critical activity take place to complete. So, changes in the
duration of critical activity leads changes in the duration of whole project (Kerzner, 2017). If
project manager requires to reduce the total time by 3 weeks then I will target only those
tasks which are included in the critical path because changes in these tasks will reduce the
total time. I will decline the time of critical task by which total time will reduce by 3 weeks.
Overall, changes in critical path may change the whole project duration. Therefore, using the
different techniques of the project management, project manager can complete the whole
project as per the estimated time and cost (Martinelli and Milosevic, 2016).

REFERENCES
Chevrier, S. (2016). A Tough Day for a French Expatriate in Vietnam: The Management of a
Large International Infrastructure Project. Intercultural Management: A Case-Based
Approach to Achieving Complementarity and Synergy, 228.
Fleming, Q. W., & Koppelman, J. M. (2016, December). Earned value project management.
Project Management Institute.
Kerzner, H. (2017). Project management metrics, KPIs, and dashboards: a guide to
measuring and monitoring project performance. John Wiley & Sons.
Martinelli, R. J., & Milosevic, D. Z. (2016). Project management toolbox: tools and
techniques for the practicing project manager. John Wiley & Sons.
Nicholas, J. M., & Steyn, H. (2017). Project management for engineering, business and
technology. Taylor & Francis.
Turner, R. (2016). Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.