Back in Unit 5 you were told the CEO of Kibby and Strand was considering an expansion of production capacity by leasing a building next door. Unfortunately, the lease on the building fell through so the CEO has decided to expand the current building and move the Receiving Department into the new space, and the Production Department will take over the current space used by the Receiving Department.

You are the Operations Manager and the CEO has tasked you to come up with a project plan for moving the Receiving Department to the new space and expanding the Production Department. Your guidance is, “come up with a plan to shift receiving to the new addition and expand production capacity using receiving’s current space with minimal impact to operations. We need to meet our contractual deadlines.” You are told that you will be able to buy new machines for production’s increasing capacity, but the current machines in the production department will still be used. In other words, you can’t throw away the existing machines in production.

Develop a project plan that will allow production to continue while the movement of machines and staff into their new locations are is taking place. The plan needs to list assumptions, constraints, and a network diagram for the move. Identify the critical path in your plan.

Instruction Guidance: It would be prudent to consider content covered in chapters 17 and 18 of the textbook; however, there are many other useful resources available on the Internet and in the literature to support the construction of your project plan.

The project plan should be prepared as a Microsoft™ Word document, and then attached to the unit discussion thread. There is no minimum or maximum in terms of the word count; however, the response should explicitly address all required components of this discussion assignment. The document should be prepared consistent with the APA writing style (6th edition) and reflect higher level cognitive processing (analysis, synthesis and or evaluation).

This week you’re preparing a project management plan. The difference in a project plan and the other plans you created is a project has defined start and end dates, where as an operational plan is ongoing. Your project management plan needs to consider the construction timeline for the new expansion, and meet the intent of the CEO’s tasking. He / she is expecting a project plan that results in operations being conducted as much as possible while the expansion is taking place. You can have some downtime, but it needs to be minimized.

The three key items you need in the project management plan are: task list, network diagram, and critical path with total time required for the project and the tasks that lie on this path. Each task has a defined start and stop, and you are free to come up with those dates…just make them somewhat realistic.

1.5 pages