BUSINESS QUANTATIVE ANALYSIS AND STATISTICS 1

Project Management

Scenario: You are a consultant with expertise in project management strategies. Select a possible project management situation from your current or future professional experience. As a project management consultant, you are tasked with developing a project management plan for this project. Your goal is to maximize the time, resources and finances associated with the project in the best interests of the business/company. You will need to write a professional memo to the business/company owner describing the management of the project.

Use Excel QM to create the project. See video in Live Binder.

Your professional memo should include:

Create the PERT/CPM activity network for your project that includes at least five activities and at least one predecessor activity.

Estimate the optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic times to then determine an expected time for each activity.

Determine all activities that are on the critical path.
Identify the slack time (if any) associated with activities in the project.
Create a Gantt chart to show the project timeline.
Address the following questions in your professional memo:

What is the overall timeline for this project?
What activities are critical for established timeline of the project?
What activities have flexibility in completion that would not impact the overall project timeline?
What time, resources and money might be affected by any changes to activities throughout the project?
What recommendations would you suggest to prioritize the company's time, resources and money with regards to the project?

BUSINESS QUANTATIVE ANALYSIS AND STATISTICS 2

Statistical Quality Control

A venture capitalist has just given you several million dollars to develop your dream product! Explain in detail what this product is and why people would buy it. (Think Steve Jobs and the iPhone - did people really think we needed "smartphones" back in 2007?)

Now it has gone into production and the manager is asking you, as the statistical expert, to use statistical methods to ensure quality control.

Describe your product, its use and societal value in at least one paragraph. Humor is encouraged.

You will generate a random dataset of N samples of defective proportions by completing the following steps:

You will start with a random number by combining the last 2 digits of the year in which you were born plus the day of the month in which you were born. For example, if you were born October 3, 1990, your number would be 90 + 3 = 93. (If your number exceeds 100, subtract 100 from the total.) Call this X and it will seed your random number generation.

Choose a number of samples, N. N should be between 5 and 10.

In Excel, type =RAND()*X in a cell. Repeat N times. This will generate the proportion of defective products (out of 100) for your N samples.
Use Excel QM to create a p-chart for a sample size, 100, and the number of samples, N. Share your p-chart. See video in Live Binder.

Share Lower Control Limit (LCL) and Upper Control Limit (UCL).

Is the product in control? If not in control, what sample(s) was outside of the limits, i.e. below LCL or above UCL?