UGC NET COMMERCE January 2017(Paper-II) Q21
- Option : B
- Explanation : PERT was originally developed in 1958 and 1959 to meet the needs of the ‘age of massive engineering’ where the techniques of Taylor and Gantt were inapplicable. The Special Projects Office of the U.S. Navy, concerned with performance trends on large military development programs, introduced PERT on its Polaris Weapon System in 1958, after the technique had been developed with the aid of the management consulting firm of Booz, Allen, and Hamilton. Since that time, PERT has spread rapidly throughout almost all industries. At about the same time, the DuPont Company initiated a similar technique known as the critical path method (CPM), which also has spread widely, and is particularly concentrated in the construction and process industries.
In the early 1960s, the basic requirements of PERT/time as established by the Navy were as follows:
∎ All of the individual tasks to complete a program must be clear enough to be put down in a network, which comprises events and activities; i.e., follow the work breakdown structure.
∎ Events and activities must be sequenced on the network under a highly logical set of ground rules that allow the determination of critical and subcritical paths. Networks may have more than one hundred events, but not fewer than ten.
∎ Time estimates must be made for each activity on a three-way basis. Optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic-elapsed-time figures are estimated by the person(s) most familiar with the activity.
