Abstract

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Larry Koo, the co-founder and creative lead of KOODESIGN, needed to come up with a plan to complete a client’s project from design all the way to market within six months for a robotic device equipped with disinfectants. Given such a tight project schedule and the high client’s expectations of quality, Larry realized that he was indeed in a race against time and would need to think differently to fast track this project to meet the client’s deadline. Larry decided to fast track this project by adjusting some of the initial task duration and start time as well as the sequence specifications. By concurrently completing tasks that would normally be completed sequentially, Larry hoped to compress the project duration just enough time to meet the client’s launch date. However, fast tracking a project would also create a higher chance of resource overloading problems that Larry needed to address since his design studio’s resources were limited.

Learning Objectives

After analyzing the case, students should be able to:

1.       Discuss how setting the project priorities will impact the tradeoff decisions on performance, cost, and time of a project 

2.       Present the project activities in the form of a network diagram or Gantt chart

3.       Identify the critical path to determine the project duration

4.       Develop a solution for solving a time-constrained project

5.       Apply the fast-tracking concepts to compress a project duration

6.       Discuss the alternative approaches to resolve the resource over-allocation issues when compressing a project schedule