ENG7143 Principles of Project Management

Style:

Individual Report

Tesla Inc is an American electric car and clean energy company based in California, USA.

Tesla’s future project is to build another Gigafactory in Austin, Texas. (Please note, assumption will be made about the new upcoming Gigafactory in this case study, but only for the purpose of this assignment).

The new Gigafactory project will start in January 1, 2024 and will be completed in time for the start of the 2026 season (project duration of 2 years). If the project is delayed past the completion date, the company will start to occur a cost of $1,000,000 per day, against the initial budget set aside for the project. Elon Musk, the CEO of the company revealed the cost of the project could be as much as $1 Billion.

Phase one (infrastructure) of the project will start by sourcing the appropriate site to construct the new Gigafactory. An activity known as site selection; this will last for 30 days. Once the land is sourced in Austin, Texas after careful consideration, work will begin for land preparation which will take around 35 days to complete. The design and planning for the facilities, will start simultaneously. The design activity will last for 35 days and planning will take 55 days to complete. Next will come the built phase, the actual construction of the building. One of the longest activities of the project, lasting about 150 days. To complete the construction and to the make the building watertight, a roof must be constructed, which will add another 60 days to the project. Only once it becomes watertight, the plumbing and the electrics will be allowed to be installed simultaneously. Plumbing will take around 30 days and electrics a little longer 40 days. Finally, to complete the first stage of the project a final inspection of work will be carried out, this can take up to 10 days to inspect.

Phase two (internal assembly and support systems) the construction and integration of the internal manufacturing assembly system. An assembly system is a robotic manufacturing process in which parts are added as the product (vehicle) moves from work area to work area, where the parts are added in sequence until the final product is produced. The integration of all the systems represents the most significant technical challenge to the project. In order of production, the first area to be fitted out will be the battery and drivetrain assembly area, a 70 days activity. Followed by seat assembly area 50 days and final vehicle assembly area 80 days. To finalise the production stage, a paint and ventilation area will be completed in 90 days. Eventually, to support the production a central supply building needs to be constructed (100 Days) and finally, a test track outside the building (80 days) to test out the final product before it leaves the Gigafactory.

Given the information provided answer the following questions:

Individual report

You are required to produce a report. As you work through your report, you need to justify the decisions you have made, and if you make any assumption also need to be noted.

Tasks

1.    Will the project be able to be completed by the January 2026 deadline? To answer this question, construct a WBS, Gantt Chart and Network Diagram (ND) for the project. Provide the ND with justified interdependency, also include both forward and backward calculation to identify the total duration of the project. Present good discussion about the critical path and activities slack. In this task, firstly calculations should be done by hand, afterward, you need to compare your results with MSP. (20 points)

2.    Consider two types of resources for this project, such as workers and loaders. Assign them to some activities. Using MSP, perform resource scheduling and discuss the impact of resource scheduling on the project duration. Assuming some limitations on the number of available resources, if there is overutilization in some time units, you are allowed to hire more resources. Resource smoothing should be also applied by MSP and its implications need to be explained. (25 points)

3.    What steps might be taken to improve the timing schedule if the project were required to be completed in 100 days earlier? The impact of suggestions to reduce the project time should be investigated by a time-cost trade off technique. An optimal project duration should be estimated by MSP and discussed through a graph. (30 points)

4.    Develop time-phased budgeting based on some cost assumption. Don’t forget that the available total budget is $1 Billion. A top-down cost estimation is recommended. Assume a fictious progress for some activities after one year (month 12). Then, apply and perform calculating Earned-Value KPIs by MSP with provide good explanations in details. (25 points)

(Hint: some reasonable assumptions might be proposed for direct and indirect cost along with normal/crash time and costs.