🎸Welcome to Rock'n Bands
Master critical path management
Overview
Your company, Planners 'R Us, specializes in effectively managing projects. Previous experience has involved conference management systems, commercial construction, and software development projects.
A new, intriguing project offers another opportunity to apply your project management expertise. The university you just graduated from wishes to put together a music festival, “Rock’n Bands.” This will feature a number of top music groups, and should attract interest from students, local residents, and music fans throughout the region.
Your company has met with University officials to develop a list of activities required to make Rock’n Bands a reality. The list on the CPM Chart and Task Progress pages includes twelve activities as well as their durations and immediate predecessors. The project plan is described visually on the CPM Chart with a network diagram. Each activity shows the number of weeks of work that activity is expected to require. Arrows denote the order of activities. For instance, activity E cannot be started until activity A is completed, and activity H cannot be started until both C and D are complete. The start and end nodes are dummy nodes and do not need to be worked on. Note that at the beginning of the project, activities A, C, and D are available to start working on, as they have no predecessor activities. Be sure to understand the diagram before beginning your game.
Your goal
Your job is to allocate workers to tasks each week during the project. Planners ‘R Us has agreed to complete the project in 10 weeks (finishing two weeks before the Festival) and wants to minimize the costs associated with the project. All tasks A-K must be completed in 10 weeks. You have four (4) workers, although you do not need to use all of them every week – there are other tasks they can do in your company.
For bookkeeping purposes, your company will charge $200 per week for each worker that you use. If you happen to need an additional worker, there is one (1) available, but that person would then not get their other work done; thus, you will be charged $300 per week for the additional worker. In addition, if the project is “late,” there will be complications during the last two weeks before the Festival, costing Planners ‘R Us $2000 per week due to a serious loss of goodwill and plenty of negative publicity.
The final cost to consider involves expediting tasks. You can assign an extra worker to a task in any given week in order to finish it in less time. For instance, if a task requires two (2) weeks but you assign two workers, it will be completed in one week. However, putting two workers on a task is not quite as efficient as having one worker complete it from start to finish. Doing this requires additional coordination (by you) and may require some overtime by the workers. These costs total an additional $100 per week. The most workers that can be assigned to any task in a week are two (since having three or more requires so much additional coordination that no reduction in time is achieved). To summarize, the most workers on any given task are two (2) per week, and the total number of workers you may employ for any week is at most five (5).
Get Started
Now that you understand the game overview, you can dive into the mechanics below.
🎮pagePlaying the Game🎸pageAssigning Workers📩pageDownloading ResultsAcknowledgments
The game was originally designed by Ken Klassen from Brock University and Keith Willoughby from Bucknell University. The web application was designed by Sarah Deak and Kenny Wilson and developed by Aaron Horne, Alan Thomas, Matt Gyure, and Steven Smith.
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