The CEO of Kibby and Strand recently signed a contract with Amazon to market and distribute some of its products. As a result, the CEO decided to build a new addition to the current building to accommodate the need for more shipping dock space. Shipping will move to the new addition and Production will expand into the space Shipping currently uses.
You are the Operations Manager, and the CEO has tasked you to come up with a project plan for moving the Shipping Department to the new addition and expanding the Production Department into Shipping’s old space. Your guidance is, “come up with a plan to shift move Shipping to the new addition and expand production capacity using Shipping’s current space with minimal impact to operations. We need to meet our contractual deadlines.” You are told that you will be able to buy new machines for production’s increasing capacity, but the current machines in the production department will still be used. In other words, you can’t throw away the existing machines in production.
Develop a project plan that will allow production to continue while the movement of machines and staff into their new locations is taking place. The plan needs to list assumptions, constraints, and a network diagram for the move. Also, identify the critical path in your plan and its length in days.
Instruction Guidance:
This week you’re preparing a project management plan. The difference in a project plan and the other plans you created is a project has defined start and end dates, whereas an operational plan is ongoing. Your project management plan needs to consider the construction timeline for the new expansion and meet the intent of the CEO’s tasking. He / she is expecting a project plan that results in operations being conducted as much as possible while the expansion is taking place. You can have some downtime, but it needs to be minimized.
The three key items you need in the project management plan are: 1) task list with task durations; 2) network diagram depicting the order the tasks are completed; and 3) the critical path, including length, within the network diagram for the project. Each task has a defined start and stop, and you are free to come up with those dates…just make them somewhat realistic.
