Chapter 7. Scheduling
7.7 Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
- The project schedule management plan is one of the sub-plans of the overall project plan. It provides the guidelines on how to develop a project schedule by defining and sequencing project activities and milestones, and by estimating activity durations.
- The activity definition process is a further breakdown of the work package elements of the WBS which was created while planning the scope.
- After the lowest level activities are defined in the activity list, each activity is reviewed and evaluated to determine the duration. An estimate is an educated guess based on knowledge, experience, and inference. Five types of estimation methods are expert judgment, analogous estimating, parametric estimating, three-point estimates, and bottom-up estimating.
- Showing the activities in rectangles or circles, and their relationships (dependencies) as arrows is called a precedence diagramming method (PDM). This kind of diagram is also called an activity-on-node (AON) diagram.
- Four types of logical relationships (dependencies) are “Finish-to-Start” (FS), “Finish-to-Finish” (FF), “Start-to-Start” (SS), and “Start-to-Finish” (SF). The most common relationship is Finish-to-Start at which we start a successor activity once we finish the predecessor activity.
- The process to create an activity network diagram is composed of two main steps: (1) Forward pass, and (2) backward pass. When these steps are completed, the critical path can be identified.
- A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that displays the start and finish dates of project activities, and their dependency relationships with one another.
