Navigating Project Management Challenges After a Hurricane Strike: A Comprehensive Evaluation

Please respond to the following:
Evaluate  your project management options in terms of schedule, performance, and  cost for the following scenario. Support your evaluation.
An  office building construction project in the southern Virginia area is 80  percent complete when a major hurricane strikes. Progress on the  worksite stops for 10 days while damage is assessed and repairs are  completed. The project has a fixed budget and a completion date that  cannot be moved.
Be sure to respond to at least one of your classmates’ posts.
Respond to student below
  
Thomas Gutche         
Yesterday Aug 17 at 4:37pm          
Hello Dr. Marion and Classmates
In this week’s discussion, we are evaluating our options following a  hurricane strike at our project.  The work site has stopped for ten  days, and we need to assess the impact on schedule, performance, and  cost to determine how to proceed. 
Evaluations options:
Schedule- The completion date of the project cannot  be moved.  The options that would be looked at would be accelerating  work or adjusting the schedule of other tasks to begin earlier than  planned.  The risk would be potentially impacting quality and building  safety by allowing a rushed timeline and/or working on other tasks  before predecessor tasks are completed.  Our risk planning during  project initiation should have determined whether it would be a highly,  probably highly impactful risk.  Risk planning should have created a  response on adjusting the timeline and tasks due to weather-related  issues.  This could be how tasks were scheduled to allow those with the  flexibility to be moved if needed to move up critical tasks. There may  be work in parallel or accelerated work, but schedule planning would  have been done to consider the potential delay due to weather.
Performance: With the completion date and budget  fixed, a 10-day delay will negatively impact project performance.  This  also leads to potentially reduced quality of work performed and  potential safety issues.  The options are similar to scheduled, where  either work must be accelerated, or tasks created in parallel.  Risk  planning done at the start of the project would have allowed for this  weather issue to re-arrange tasks to allow for earlier start times in  some to mitigate potential weather delays.  There would also be a  ‘transfer’ risk response to bring in contracted work for tasks that  require more skilled needs that might take the existing crew longer to  complete.  This potentially could increase costs but leave schedule and  performance intact. 
Cost-Being on a fixed budget and launching on time  after a 10-day delay has major impacts on the project.  The options to  compensate for lost time include accelerating work, bringing in  additional resources, or adjusting schedules to launch the project at  cost and on time.  Knowing that weather would be a risk identified up  front, mitigation planning would have anticipated possible weather  delays and set aside funds to bring in more resources if needed to make  up for the delay.  Risk planning could also use the response to transfer  the risk to an outside vendor that could do the work faster with the  same quality output.  If funding weren’t put in a contingency fund,  other costs would need to be used to pay for that outside vendor. 
All three would be highly impacted by the weather delay, but with  this being an outside project and being in an area where the weather is  known to be a factor, risk planning upfront could have mitigated the  impact and allowed the project to be completed on time and in budget.   The most likely mitigation would have been adjusting schedules if needed  to allow for parallel work to be done should predecessor tasks get  delayed.  Also, planning on using a vendor and transferring risk to them  to complete tasks at an accelerated rate with quality could be used,  but this would most likely be at an extra cost, so cost-saving measures  would need to be implemented to cover the extra expense.
Feedback welcomed on my evaluation of the scenario. Have a great week!
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