SECTION A

1. Elyna Deschamps has just left herjob as a website designer for a large systems design company and is about to start up her own website design business. She will be renting an office that needs to be prepared, and also needs to procure all the necessary equipment before the business can commence operating. She intends to open her business in 12 weeks’ time. In her Previous role, she often encountered critical path analysis when she was
involved in large design projects, and she considers that this technique may also be useful to help her to plan the setting up of the new business.

Elyna has devised a list of activities shown below that must be completed before the new business can commence. When drawing up this list she was aware that there was a degree of uncertainty in the timescales for some of the activities. She is concerned that if these uncertainties are not considered at this stage, then she may not hit the deadline of opening her new business in 1 or 2 weeks’ time.

(a) Determine the critical path and the planned duration of the project.
(b) Identify any non-critical tasks and the float (free slack) on each.
(c) Discuss the use of contingency planning in helping Elyna plan for the uncertainties in setting up the business.