Project management exam

Tonight we lit the eighth candle of Chanuka. The reason for lighting eight candles is that, according to the legend, there was only enough oil for a lamp in the Temple to stay alight for one day; despite this, the lamp stayed lit for eight days. This is called the miracle of Chanuka.

I had my own small Chanuka miracle today when the Project Management exam was not too hard. I'm not saying that it was easy, though; I finished the exam after two hours and 40 minutes, whereas previous exams have taken at the most two hours and 20 minutes.

I'm fairly confident that I did well on the exam (let's say 70%), although the more I think about the exam, the more I can think of things which I didn't answer well. The case study was about an oil exploration company, which is a lot simpler than some of the example case studies that I have seen. Drawing the organisational breakdown structure (OBS) wasn't too hard, although it may well be that I misunderstood one of the questions about the contracts involved.

As expected, question 2 was a critical path method question with crashing until a certain limit. This question held no problems for me, although there was a twist in one of the subquestions: after the project has been fully crashed, how can it be speeded up even more? I can think of two ways: compromising on quality (which means that each step won't take so long), and fast tracking, in which one activity is started before its predecessor has finished. I may write to the course designer to ask whether there are any other ways of speeding up the project.

The third question, as expected, was about EVA; this too held no problems but it involved a great deal of writing.

The fourth and final question was about risk. Fortunately I had been reading the course book chapter about risk in the morning, so most of the material was fresh in my mind. This question could have been about something else in which case I might not have been able to answer. To quote the opening sentence,

Explain the difference between risk and uncertainty

I'll leave with that sentence hanging in the air.