[Year 12 IPM] More Gantt / Pert Chart terminology

[Mark Kelly]

Murray O. wrote:
> Mark

> Thanks for your great PM resources …. But wait there is more
> 
> Are dummy tasks an optional feature of Pert? If not why are there no 
> dummy on the Pert Practise
> 

Ah, Oliver.  Ya can't have everything in life.

If you did, where would you put it?

Are dummy tasks optional? You use them if you need them...  like gum 
boots are optional, depending on the weather. They're handy to have 
available when the need arises.

Why no dummy on the PERT practice?  If you're referring to my PERT 
practice page, there's no dummy task because I reckon the kids won't 
need to worry about them in the real exam.

<DISCLAIMER>

- I am not an examiner.
- I am not, and never have been romantically involved with an examiner 
(not including a drunken tryst on a Tuesday in 1995).
- I have not marked IPM exam papers.
- I do not know what will be on the exam.
- Everything I say is only my opinion.
- This post contains some absolute rubbish.  YOU find it.

</DISCLAIMER>

Don't fret too much about your kids handling advanced Gantt/PERT features.

The examiners have been thrashing around like epileptic eels each year 
trying to get a decent Gantt/PERT question:

- 2000 had 3-day timescale groups, and a microscopic chart.
- 2001 was a non-standard Clayton's PERT chart.
- 2002 had a missing task and up to 3 correct answers per question.
- 2003- was good, but used dotted lines that seemed to imply dummy tasks 
as contingencies, rather than dependencies.
- 2004 - a 2-mark multiple-choice question with a reasonable Gantt 
chart, but lacking dependency arrows, though dependencies were implied 
in task names.

Dog only knows what delights we are to look forward to in 2005.  We 
can't even trust the examiners to stick to industry-standard chart 
conventions.

I really doubt the examiners will attempt anything complex (e.g. 
lag/lead time) or exotic (rollups, split tasks) on the exam.  I tell my 
better kids to stop worrying about advanced project management topics 
(e.g. allocation of resources and the effects of over-allocating people 
in the project).

Perhaps a legitimate dummy task will be as advanced as the question will 
get.

So far, the examiners have seemed happy to expect students to be able to:

- identify a critical path and calculate its length
- calculate slack time for a task
- identify the effects of changing a task's duration
- asking how any task can be done more quickly

I would not expect the examiners to demand much more from students this 
year.  PERHAPS there will be a discriminator question to separate the 
chimps from the champs, but it will be an "A+ student" sort of question 
that the chimps won't even understand, let alone be able to answer.

Mind you, if they DO have a discriminator question, they will jolly well 
better have a Gantt/PERT chart that follows standard conventions!!

--

Mind you, I have been known to be HORRENDOUSLY wrong in the past: it was 
a Tuesday in 1995, if hazy memory serves me right... I was sitting 
bathed in moonlight on an elegant staircase in a Parisian hotel with an 
attractive examiner, a bottle of Pernod, a pack of Gauloises and too 
little to regret.  Vraiment, je ne regrette rien...

Oops, I seem to have drifted off the topic.  Apologies to all examiners 
out there - especially the cute and foxy ones.  You know who you are. 
Call me.

-- 
Mark Kelly
Manager - Information Systems
McKinnon Secondary College
IPM Lecture notes: http://vceit.com
Moderator: IPM Mailing List

I'm spick, but never span.