Week 8

Back in Unit 5 you were told the CEO of Kibby and Strand was  considering an expansion of production capacity by leasing a building  next door. Unfortunately, the lease on the building fell through so the  CEO has decided to expand the current building and move the Receiving  Department into the new space, and the Production Department will take  over the current space used by the Receiving Department.

You are the Operations Manager and the CEO has tasked you to come up  with a project plan for moving the Receiving Department to the new space  and expanding the Production Department.  Your guidance is, “come up  with a plan to shift receiving to the new addition and expand production  capacity using receiving’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 are is taking  place. The plan needs to list assumptions, constraints, and a network  diagram for the move. Identify the critical path in your plan.

Instruction Guidance: It would be prudent to  consider content covered in chapters 17 and 18 of the textbook; however,  there are many other useful resources available on the Internet and in  the literature to support the construction of your project plan. 

The project plan should be prepared as a Microsoft™ Word document,  and then attached to the unit discussion thread. There is no minimum or  maximum in terms of the word count; however, the response should  explicitly address all required components of this discussion  assignment. The document should be prepared consistent with the APA  writing style (6th edition) and reflect higher level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis and or evaluation).  

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, where as 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: task  list, network diagram, and critical path with total time required for  the project and the tasks that lie on this path.  Each task has a  defined start and stop, and you are free to come up with those  dates…just make them somewhat realistic.