Operations Management

SUMMARY: A project is defined as a group of activities with a definite starting and ending point, which is undertaken to achieve a specific objective. Project management assists organizations in coordinating and planning the usage and employment of resources required for achieving project objectives. With the increase in number of projects and number of activities in a project, the task of scheduling and assigning resources to all these activities has necessitated the use of techniques like PERT and CPM. CPM is used to find out the total duration of the project and identify the activities that are a part of the critical path. PERT employs a more probabilistic approach to finding out the project duration. Both PERT and CPM are based on networks and define the interrelationships between different activities of a project. The two networking conventions used to illustrate the relationship between different activities are the Activity-on-node and Activity-on-arrow.