PMGT1865 Project Time, Cost and Resources

How PMGT1865 is assessed

The six weights come from the University's unit outline for the Semester 2, 2026 offering and are repeated on the unit's own assessment page; they sum to exactly 100 per cent. The hurdle column carries a sentence rather than a flag because the word hurdle appears nowhere in either source, and an absence of a statement is not a published rule either way. Attendance is a published pass condition sitting outside this table: the outline sets a minimum of 85% of timetabled activities, with exceptions granted only by the Dean or the Head of School, and says that failing to meet the minimum attendance requirement may result in a fail grade; the unit's Canvas introduction page states 90% instead, so plan to the stricter figure. Two due dates also differ between sources and both are flagged in the dates table. Confirm all of it, and your own group allocation, on the unit's assessment page.

Current PMGT1865 dates

Dates are as published in the University's published unit outline for the Semester 2, 2026 offering. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.

What PMGT1865 covers

PMGT1865 organises itself into three topics, Time, Cost and Resource, taught across ten workshop weeks. This guide follows the teaching order instead, because each method is built out of the one before it: the network needs the work breakdown structure, the passes need the network, the probability work needs the passes, resource levelling needs the float, and earned value needs the time phased budget.

Assessment is six weighted components with no final examination, ending in a two hour quiz sat in the workshop in Week 13.

It teaches the tools and methods project managers use to balance the three quantities in its title: breaking work down, planning to milestones, building and calculating schedules, tracking performance against a baseline, costing the work, calculating a budget, planning the people and plant, and buying in what the team will not build.

The framing throughout is the traditional waterfall tradition, using the Project Management Body of Knowledge as its map, and the unit works through it as a single continuous method rather than as ten separate topics. The unit is unusual for a first year unit in how little of it is recall.

Almost every assessable task hands you a table of activities, durations, estimates or costs and asks you to produce a number, then to say what that number means for a decision about the schedule, the budget or the resource plan.

Four of the eight learning outcomes begin with a verb that produces a quantity: develop a precedence network and determine the critical path, determine the work effort of activities, cost the work and calculate a budget, and work out what a given risk would do to the dates, the spending and the staffing.

Delivery is blended: students read and watch material before class, then attend a two hour workshop each week where the methods are worked on a running case study, with six to eight hours of self study expected alongside. Attendance is a published pass condition that sits outside the assessment table.

The University's unit outline for this offering states that students are expected to attend a minimum of 85% of timetabled activities, that exceptions may be granted only by the Dean or the Head of School, and that failure to meet the minimum attendance requirement may result in a fail grade; it also allows additional assessment items to be set where the attendance requirement differs from 85%.

The unit's own Canvas introduction page instead states a minimum of 90%. Both figures are published by the University and this guide does not choose between them: plan to the stricter one and confirm which applies to your session. Assessment is six weighted components summing to 100 per cent, with no final examination.

Written work submitted late loses five per cent of the maximum mark per calendar day and scores zero after ten calendar days, and applications for special consideration must be submitted within three working days of the due date.

Reading a critical path, and answering the question behind it

Key terms

Work breakdown structure

A structure that takes everything the project team has to execute and splits it, level by level, into deliverables sitting inside deliverables. It defines scope in operational terms and must capture everything the project plans to do and everything it plans to buy, because the schedule, the budget and the resource plan are all built on top of it.

Float

How long an activity can sit idle before the whole job finishes later than promised. It is computed as late start minus early start once both passes are complete, and an activity with zero float is critical.

Critical path

The connected chain of activities that carry no float, running from the start of the network to the activity that determines the project duration. Delaying any one of them delays the whole project by the same amount.

Link lag

The gap between the early finish of a preceding activity and the early start of the one that follows it. It is measured after the forward pass rather than set in advance, and in an overlapped network the floats are computed from it.

Expected duration

The weighted mean of three estimates, counting the most likely value four times and each extreme once over six shares. It differs from the most likely value whenever the estimates are skewed, which for activity durations is almost always.

Resource levelling

Reshuffling work inside available float so that busy days flatten and quiet days fill. It buys a lower peak with the schedule's remaining slack, so a levelled plan uses its crew efficiently and absorbs future delay poorly.

Responsibility assignment matrix

The intersection of the work breakdown structure and the organisation breakdown structure, defining who is responsible for each item of work. In its RACI form it also records who approves, who contributes and who is kept informed.

Contingency

Funds held for work the project has already agreed to going worse than planned, such as activities running long. It is split into project contingency for known unknowns and management reserve for unknown unknowns, and it is never a funding source for new scope.

Cost baseline

The time phased direct cost of the project, built by allocating each activity's estimated cost to the period in which it occurs. It is the curve that performance is measured against once the work starts.

Earned value

The value of completed work expressed in the budget assigned to it, computed as percent complete multiplied by the budget allocated. It is always priced at planned cost rather than at actual cost, which is what allows a cost variance to exist at all.

PMGT1865 FAQ

How to prepare for the assessments

Treat this unit as one continuous method rather than ten topics, and carry a single project of your own invention through all of it. Ten or so activities is enough.

Draw its work breakdown structure, sequence it into a network, pass it forwards and backwards, put an overlapping relationship on two of its links and recompute, replace the durations with three point estimates, level one resource across it, price it, phase the budget across three periods, and then report it at the halfway point with earned value.

Every join between chapters becomes visible when the same project has to survive all of them, and the joins are where the assessment questions live.

Work the arithmetic by hand and never by reading, because the errors this unit punishes are procedural: a merge resolved with the lowest rather than the highest early finish, an efficiency factor multiplied instead of divided, standard deviations added instead of variances, a subtraction reversed in an earned value calculation. Each of those produces a plausible number, which is the expensive kind of mistake.

Build the habit of running the checks the methods already give you: the backward pass must return the first node to zero, the durations along the critical path must sum to the project duration, the phased budget periods must reconcile to the cost baseline. Each takes seconds and each converts a wrong answer into a corrected one.

Keep one page of the unit's own numbers, since the weightings, the late penalty, the three working day window for special consideration, the five accuracy classes and the RACI letters are what make an answer specific rather than generic. Finally, practise the second half of every question.

Almost every task here is a calculation followed by an interpretation, and the interpretation carries roughly a third of the marks: say what the number tells a project manager to do differently, and name what the method cannot see.

When something will not stick, ask Sia to explain it a different way and to set you a fresh version of the same calculation to work; it teaches the method and checks your reasoning, and it never substitutes for your own graded work. Confirm your semester's dates and weightings on the unit's own pages in your first week.

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