Construction Project Management Resource Leveling in Columbia River C

Question: Discuss about the Report on WBS, Critical Path and Resource Leveling in Columbia River Crossing Project? Answer: WBS and Critical Path Project Scope The scope of the Columbia River Crossing Project is to increase the mobility with maintaining the existing and expected transport facility demand. The improvement of prompt transport is considered in the project scope with connectivity, lesser travel time in public transportation operations. The river crossing project will be implemented in order to mitigate the specific issues of congestion, growing utility of freight with emphasizing public safety (Sears et al.). Moreover, the project considers the transportation safety, accident vulnerabilities and limiting the traffic rules and regulations. Another important scope of the project is to enhance the public transportation facilities to the connection between Portland Central City and Vancouver City. The recent research over public transportation shows that the tourists at a higher rate, prefers to roam from Portland Central City, Vancouver City, and country of Clark as landmark tour location (Walker). The main focusing of the implementation should be over the reconnecting the tour locations with new series of highways around the existing bridge. As the current situation prevails, in some cases, the highways cannot be extended for meeting the transportation demand. Therefore, the project authority considers the light rail network to include the above identified tour locations (Wu et al.). However, the project problem domain clearly mentions that the increasing demand of transportation facility between the locations is the primary area of priority in the project. In this scope consideration, some assumptions are taken into account, as transportation system restructuring will greatly influence over the trading strategy. On the other hand, the project will be implemented within the mentioned timeline and as well as according to the budget planning (Choudhry et al.). The issues are eliminated from the project assumptions, as the construction activity will hamper the transportation system for a limited time, stakeholder skill, vendor support, project schedule changing, and delivery time. Work Breakdown Structure Figure 1: Work Breakdown Structure (Source: Created by author) Critical Path Figure 2: Critical path in Gantt chart (Source: Created by author) Resources The project manager will need to consider two ways for the resource overload reduction. The resource overload reduction can be mitigated with leveling of resources within available slack and beyond slack (Damci and Gul Polat). These two techniques are better in this project aspect for resource leveling and maintaining same workload on the existing resources. The available slack is the extra time specified during any activity completion. For instance, one activity is dependent over another activity, now; the second activity will have available slack or delay of time with respect to the previous task. The slack is generally identified in any scheduling tool as the amount time delay can be considered based on the previous activities or predecessors (Kuzenkov and Evgeniy Gromakov). Therefore, the primary task will need to be rescheduled or completed within time to reduce the slack. Resource leveling within available slack The resources that are overloaded can be leveled within this delay consideration of the project. This technique of leveling is identified as Resource leveling within available slack (Tran and Nhat-Duc Hoang). The technique does not affect the entire project completion and hence, the utility of this technique is more rather than the beyond leveling scenario. Resource leveling beyond available slack Again, in this context, the resources are allocated with beyond time consideration from the project. In some cases of project management, the project managers face some difficulties in completing the activities within time, some certain risks emerges (Tang and Quanxin Sun). Therefore, the resources are leveled beyond slack in the project. In beyond cases, the project manager is provided with extra timeline for resource leveling (Kang et al.). In such scenario, the project timeline should be extended in order to complete the project within time. Circumstances for techniques usage These two leveling techniques have separate circumstances of usage in project management scenario. The available slack resource leveling is feasible with extended timeline consideration in any project, the beyond slack resource leveling is possible with organization consideration (Tran and Keith Molenaar). In first technique, the project manager have flexibility of managing activities in order to level the resources and in the second technique, the project manager should require extra time allocation from the concerned authority. The utilized resource leveling technique In this project, there are some critical tasks and some of the activities are not. Therefore, the project manager should consider the resource leveling within slack technique. This technique is feasible in this project, as the project manager have some amount of time for managing the resource overload. In order to level the resource, the manager should consider the critical activities for individual effort manipulation (Zavadskas et al.). For instance, one resource that is overloaded in the critical tasks, the resource will be eliminated from the non-critical tasks and opposite case is implemented. The resources are leveled with this technique with balancing their individual efforts to the project deliverables and circulate their effort for minimizing overloading (Ebrat and Reza Ghodsi). This technique will not affect on the project completion time and as well as no other factor will be responsible for limiting the project completion in time. Therefore, resource allocation within ava ilable slack will be better for the project. Resources Sears, S. Keoki, et al.Construction project management. John Wiley Sons, 2015. Walker, Anthony.Project management in construction. John Wiley Sons, 2015. Wu, Zezhou, et al. "Quantifying construction and demolition waste: An analytical review."Waste Management34.9 (2014): 1683-1692. Choudhry, Rafiq M., et al. "Cost and schedule risk analysis of bridge construction in Pakistan: Establishing risk guidelines."Journal of Construction Engineering and Management140.7 (2014): 04014020. Ebrat, Mehdi, and Reza Ghodsi. 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