Large Homes Inc. is currently in the midst of a big residential construction project. The company's operations manager is looking at estimated completion dates for the various phases of construction. A major problem that he encounters is that the site excavation took three weeks longer than anticipated. The operations manager wants to make up the lost time in the other phases, but those phases are also falling behind because of the use of construction materials and methods the company has never used before. Which of the following tools might have helped the operations manager better manage the project scheduling?
A) Enterprise Resource Planning
B) Critical Path Method
C) Computeraided design
D) Vertical integration

Question

Large Homes Inc. is currently in the midst of a big residential construction project. The company's operations manager is looking at estimated completion dates for the various phases of construction. A major problem that he encounters is that the site excavation took three weeks longer than anticipated. The operations manager wants to make up the lost time in the other phases, but those phases are also falling behind because of the use of construction materials and methods the company has never used before. Which of the following tools might have helped the operations manager better manage the project scheduling?
A) Enterprise Resource Planning
B) Critical Path Method
C) Computer­aided design
D) Vertical integration

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The Critical Path Method (CPM) would have helped the operations manager better manage the project scheduling. CPM is a project management technique that identifies the critical path of a project, which is the longest sequence of tasks that must be completed in order to meet the project's deadline. By identifying the critical path, the operations manager could have focused on those tasks and made changes to their scheduling and resource allocation in order to keep the project on track. This would have helped compensate for the lost time during site excavation and ensure that the other phases didn't fall too far behind.