You are now a seasoned project manager at a well-known consulting company. A junior colleague you are mentoring is tasked with writing his first major proposal. In this proposal he needs to list the tasks, costs, and completion times, and estimate the total cost and project completion time. He needs help in figuring out what total project completion time to put into the proposal. The possible client fines companies heavily for every week they go beyond their proposed total project completion time. Your junior colleague did the CPM/PERT diagram for uncertain activity times, but is nervous, because he doesn't remember how to use this to for total project times. What advice should you give him?
Recall that the distribution of total project times can be approximated by a normal distribution, with expected total times and expected total variance estimated from the CPM/PERT table and diagram. (See questions above).
a) Propose a total project time based on a large percentile (e.g. 90th, 95th, 99th), so that there is small chance of going over the proposed project time.
b) Propose using the median time of the project completion time, because the median is robust against extreme outliers for project time.
c) Use the mode for the normal distribution, because that is the most frequently occurring number.
d) Propose using the expected total project time calculated from the CPM/PERT tables and diagram.