OPM300 - Intro. to Operations Mgmt. CA - Essay Example

Hard Rock Café Rockfest Figure identifies the critical path of the activities necessary for the completion of the project. The encircled value identifies the total amount of time needed to complete the project, which is 34 weeks.Figure 1. Critical Path of Rockest Activities. In addition, in the event that Event B takes 5 weeks instead of 3 weeks, the whole project would now take a total of 36 weeks to complete. Thus, it would be necessary to crash one of the activities that branches out of Event B in order to compensate for this extension and ensure that the whole project would still take only 34 weeks to complete.

As such, Event O is the most likely candidate because crashing Event O will result to a compensation of two weeks, which is just sufficient to compensate for the weeks lost in extending Event B.Challenges to a Project Manager The key player in the success of a project is undoubtedly the project manager. Their roles include managing the project throughout the project cycle, balancing technical, schedule, and cost performance, solving problems expeditiously as they arise, and inspiring and motivating the entire team (Forsberg, Mooz, & Cotterman, 2005).

With a project as extensive and large scale as the one described above, a project manager needs to have the right skills and tools in facing and overcoming the many different challenges that such a project can produce (Elearn Limited (Great Britain), 2005). One such challenge would be that project teams may be geographically dispersed. Since projects are usually collaborative efforts, different team members may be physically located in locations that may cause logistic challenges (Kerzner, 2009).

Thus, a project manager must know how to ensure that logistic considerations are put in place when scheduling required events. Another problem that a project manager may face is the challenge of overbooked and mismanaged resources. Due to certain shortcoming, project teams may not have accurate information about their resources and what they are working on (Archibald, 2003). Some project teams may have more demand for projects than they have team members to execute the projects. Thus, a project manager has to be aware of these limitations and be alert enough to compensate appropriately.

ReferencesArchibald, R. (2003). Managing high technology programs and projects. John Wiley & Sons.Elearn Limited (Great Britain). (2005). Management extra: project management. Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.Forsberg, K., Mooz, H., & Cotterman, H. (2005). Visualizing project management: models and frameworks for mastering complex systems. John Wiley & Sons.Kerzner, H. (2009). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.