Introducing Project Management Concepts Using a Jewelry Store Robbery

This paper describes the use of a simple hands-on case in undergraduate classes to teach the concepts of a traditional PERT/CPM and Critical Chain project management techniques. A simple six-activity project is used to illustrate: the identification of project activities, development of activity time estimates, the development of the project network, the development of the PERT/CPM critical path and the probability of on-time completion using the critical path, the development of the critical chain, and the probability of on-time completion using the critical chain. The case can be readily extended to discuss the effects of activity crashing, as well as the proper placement of buffers within the critical chain network. The overall objective is simply to illustrate the development and use of the critical chain in single project management.