Product Design Project at NOKIA You work for Nokia in its global cell phone group. You have been made project manager for the design of a new cell phone. Your supervisors have already scoped the project so you have a list showing the work breakdown structure, and this includes major project activities. You must plan the project schedule and calculate project duration. Your boss wants the schedule on his desk tomorrow morning! You have been given the information in Exhibit 1. It includes all the activities required in the project and the duration of each activity. Also, dependencies between the activities have been identified. Remember that the preceding activity must be fully completed before work on the following activity can be started. Your project is divided into five major subprojects. Subproject P involves developing specification for the new cell phone. Here decisions related to such things as battery life, size of the phone, and features need to be made. These details are based on how a customer uses the cell phone. These user specifications are redefined in terms that have meaning to the subcontractors that will actually make the new cell phone in subproject S, supplier specification. These involve engineering details for how the product will perform. The individual components that make up the product are the focus of subproject D. Subproject I bring all the components together, and a working prototype is built and tested. Finally in subproject V, suppliers are selected and contracts are negotiated. 1. Draw a project network that includes all the activities. 2. Calculate the start and finish times for each activity and determine the minimum number of weeks for completing the project. Find the activities that are on the critical path for completing the project in the shortest time. 3. Identify slack in the activities not on the project critical path. 4. Your boss would like you to study the impact of making two changes to how the project is organized. The first change involves using dedicated teams that would work strictly in parallel on the activities in each subproject. For example, in subproject P (product specification) the team would work on P1, P2, P3 and P4 all in parallel. In other words, there would be no precedence relationship within a subproject – all tasks within a subproject would be worked on at the same time and each would take the same amount of time as originally specified. With this new design, all the subprojects would be done sequentially with P done first, then S, D, I, and finally V. What would be the expected impact on how long it would take to complete the project if this change were made? 5. The second change your boss would like you to consider would be to select the suppliers during subproject P and have them work directly with the dedicated teams as described in problem. This would involve adding an additional activity to subproject P called supplier selection and contract negotiation (P5) with a duration of 12 weeks. This new activity would be done in parallel with P1, P2, P3, and P4. Subprojects S and V would be eliminated from the project. What would be the expected impact on how long it would take to complete the project if this additional change were made?
6. Evaluate the impact of making these changes using criteria other than just the time to complete the project. Do you think it would be in Nokia’s best interest to try to make these changes in how it runs this and future cell phone design projects?
Exhibit 1. Work Breakdown Structure and Activities for the Cell Phone Design Project: Major Subproject /Activities
Activity Identification
Activity Code
Dependency Duration / (Weeks) Predecessor
Product specifications (P) Market research Overall product Specifications Hardware Software
P1 P2 P3 P4
A B C D
P1 P2 P3
2 4 5 5
Supplier specifications (S) Hardware Software
S1 S2
E F
P4 P4
5 6
Battery Display Camera Outer cover
D1 D2 D3 D4
G H I J
S1 S1 S1 D1, D2, D3
1 2 1 4
Product integration (I) Hardware User interface Software coding Prototype testing
I1 I2 I3 I4
K L M N
D4 D2 I2 I1, I3
3 4 4 4
Subcontracting (V) Suppliers selection Contract negotiation
V1 V2
O P
S1, S2 I4, V1
10 2
Product design (D)
