Operations and Project Management Case Study

Bamboo House India: Reducing Uncertainty in Project Completion Using PERT

OR

Abstract:
In today’s growing economic situation, business strategies of companies have to be dynamic and adaptable to gain competitive advantages and maximise their profitability. Business strategies involve firms undertaking numerous projects which may vary from simple to complex projects. The total project completion time depends on the completion time of all the activities involved. Project management plays a vital role in situations where complex projects are to be completed as per schedule. Projects require a group of related activities – in sequence or/and in parallel – to be completed in time. The order of initiation of the activities depends on their ‘precedence condition’. The required activities have to be logically arranged to construct a network, which is useful in analysing the project schedule. Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) is a network model, which works on the principle of Activity on Arc (AoA) approach. The essential idea of this case study is to understand the usage of PERT model in reducing uncertainties during project completion as done by Bamboo House India (BHI).

BHI, founded by Prashant Lingam and Aruna Kappagantula is a social enterprise located in Hyderabad, striving to promote green livelihood to rural and tribal population in India. The focal objective of BHI is to promote viable social, economical and environmental solutions to the rural and tribal artisans. The founders initially developed a project plan for the business operations but noticed uncertainties in time taken for activities implementation. They reviewed the situation and adopted PERT model to minimise the uncertainties in activity duration times.

Pedagogical Objectives:

• To understand about the network models and their benefits
• To understand the different steps involved in PERT model and its application in BHI.

Keywords : Project Management, Operations Research, Project Scheduling, Project Network, PERT model, Planned activity duration, preceding Activity, Uncertainty, Expected time of an activity, Optimistic time, Most likely time, Pessimistic time, Critical path, Variance