HCS 412 Week 3 Project Time Management and Scheduling Example

Thirty-Nine Weeks to the First Sleep Study: Building the Schedule, Finding the Critical Path and Reading the Gantt Chart for a Hospital Sleep Center

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

HCS/412: Project Management for Health Care Professionals

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospital, the project and its durations are composites written for a model paper; methods and findings come from the sources listed.

The charter for a composite 180-bed community hospital's six-bed sleep disorders center promises a first patient nine months after approval, or 39 weeks. The work breakdown structure lists 30 work packages. Whether 39 weeks is realistic depends not on how many tasks there are but on how they connect. This paper builds the schedule, finds the critical path and explains how the team will keep the date.

From Work Packages to Activities

Activities are the scheduled units of work needed to produce each package (Project Management Institute, 2021), and each work package was broken into activities with a clear finish. Construction, for example, became demolition, electrical and data rough-in, walls and ceilings, finishes and inspection. The schedule holds 64 activities.

Estimating Durations

For uncertain activities, the team used three-point estimates. Construction finishes had an optimistic estimate of three weeks, a most likely estimate of four and a pessimistic estimate of seven; the weighted estimate was 4.3 weeks, rounded to 4.5. Permits were estimated at six weeks based on the city's recent experience with the hospital's other projects. Technologist recruitment was estimated at 12 weeks because registered sleep technologists are scarce in the region.

Setting Dependencies

Most links are finish-to-start: construction cannot start until permits are issued. Some are less obvious. Equipment installation must wait for finishes and for the data lines. Payer credentialing requires the names and credentials of the technologists, so it cannot start until they are hired. Competency validation needs installed equipment. Some tasks can overlap: policies can be written while construction proceeds.

The Critical Path Method

Kelley and Walker (1959) described critical path planning and scheduling as a way to represent a project as linked activities, find the longest sequence of dependent activities and use it to set and manage the project's duration. The critical path is not the list of the most important tasks; it is the chain that leaves no slack, so any delay on it moves the opening date.

Tracing the Critical Path

Design, 7 weeks; permits, 6 weeks; demolition, 2 weeks; electrical and data rough-in, 4 weeks; walls and ceilings, 5 weeks; finishes, 4.5 weeks; inspection and occupancy, 2 weeks; equipment installation and testing, 2 weeks; final readiness and mock patient night, 2 weeks. Total: 34.5 weeks, leaving 4.5 weeks of buffer before the 39-week target.

The Near-Critical Path

Recruitment, 12 weeks, followed by credentialing with payers, 13 weeks, totals 25 weeks and must start by week 14 to finish before opening. With recruitment starting in week 3, this path has 11 weeks of float, but it is fragile: credentialing depends on outside payers.

The Gantt Chart in Words

Weeks 1 to 7: design. Weeks 3 to 15: recruitment runs in parallel. Weeks 8 to 13: permits. Weeks 14 to 31: construction phases. Weeks 16 to 29: credentialing. Weeks 10 to 28: information system build and testing. Weeks 20 to 30: policies and procedures. Weeks 32 to 33: equipment installation and testing. Weeks 34 to 35: staff competency validation and a mock patient night. Week 36 or earlier: first patient if all goes to plan; week 39 is the committed date.

Milestones

Design approved, week 7. Permits issued, week 13. Technologists hired, week 15. Construction complete, week 31. Payer credentialing complete, week 29. Mock patient night passed, week 35. First patient, week 39 at the latest.

Resource Leveling

The first schedule assigned the project manager to lead the vendor selection, the information system build meetings and the payer applications in the same four weeks. Resource leveling moved vendor selection earlier, into weeks 4 to 7, where the project manager had capacity, and delegated payer applications to a revenue cycle analyst.

Why Schedules Slip

Flyvbjerg (2014) argued that planners systematically underestimate durations because they imagine the best case. The team therefore kept the 4.5-week buffer at the end of the critical path rather than spreading it across tasks, where it tends to be consumed.

Health Care Schedule Risks

Three risks threaten the path: permit delays, discovery of problems behind walls during demolition and slow payer credentialing. Each has a response in the risk register next week.

Tracking the Schedule

The project manager updates the schedule weekly with actual start and finish dates. The status report shows the critical path's remaining duration against the buffer. If the buffer falls below two weeks, the sponsor is alerted.

Recovery Options

If the critical path slips, options include adding a second construction crew for finishes, overlapping inspection preparation with finishes and opening with four beds while two are completed. Each has a cost the sponsor must approve.

Lead and Lag Time

Two links needed lag. Paint must cure for five days before flooring is installed, so finishes include a built-in wait. The city requires 48 hours' notice before inspection, so inspection requests are scheduled two days before construction completes. Leaving out these small waits is a common reason schedules look shorter on paper than they turn out to be.

Outside Parties

Several activities depend on people the team does not control: the city's permit office, payers, the equipment vendor and the accrediting body. For each, the project manager recorded a named contact and a check-in date, because a task owned by an outsider still needs an insider watching it.

Tools

The schedule is kept in project scheduling software that calculates the critical path automatically and produces the Gantt chart for status reports. A simplified one-page version is shared with physicians and department managers.

Communicating the Schedule

Different audiences see different views. The sponsor sees milestones and buffer. Team members see their own tasks for the next four weeks. Referring physicians see the expected opening month.

Conclusion

Scheduling showed that the sleep center can open in 39 weeks with 4.5 weeks of buffer, provided the critical path through design, permits and construction holds and credentialing keeps pace. The critical path method tells the team where to watch, and weekly tracking tells them when to act.

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (2014). What you should know about megaprojects and why: An overview. Project Management Journal, 45(2), 6-19. https://doi.org/10.1002/pmj.21409

Kelley, J. E., & Walker, M. R. (1959). Critical-path planning and scheduling. In Papers presented at the December 1-3, 1959, eastern joint IRE-AIEE-ACM computer conference (pp. 160-173). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1460299.1460318

Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute.