Chapter 6: Project Schedule Management

What are the different project time management processes?

• Planning Schedule Management

• Defining Activities

• Sequencing Activities

• Estimating activity resources

• Estimating activity duration

• Developing the schedule

• Controlling the schedule

Defining activities involves the specific actions that will produce the project deliverables in enough _ to determine resources and schedule estimates.

identifying, details

Activity list

a tabulation of activities to be included on a project schedule

Milestone

a significant event that usually has no duration

Sequencing activities involves _ the reasons for dependencies and the different types of dependencies.

evaluating

A dependency or a relationship is the sequencing of …

project activities or tasksMa

Mandatory dependencies

inherent in the nature of the work being performed on a project

Discretionary dependencies

defined by the project team, sometimes called soft logic.

External dependencies

involves relationships between project and non-project activities

_ are the preferred technique for showing activity sequencing.

Network diagrams

What do boxes represent in a Precedence diagramming method?

activities

What are the difference types of dependencies between activites in a PDM?

• finish-to-start

• start-to-start

• finish-to-finish

  • start-to-finish

What does duration include?

actual amount of time worked plus elapsed time

Effort is…

the number of work days or hours required to complete a task and does not represent duration.

A three-point estimate is an estimate that includes an…

optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimate.

Critical Path Method

Network diagramming technique used to predict total project duration.

critical path

series o factivites that determine the earliest time which the project can be completed.

What is the first step to calculating the critical path?

developing a good network diagram and add the duration estimates for all activities.

How do you calculate the critical path?

The longest path in a network diagram is the critical path.

Free slack or free float

amount of time the activity can be delayed without delaying the early start of any immediately following activities.

Total slack or total float

amount of time an activity may be delayed from its early start without delaying the planned project finish date.

Forward pass determines…

the early start and finish dates

Backward pass determines…

the late start and finish dates

Critical Chain Scheduling considers _ when creating a project schedule and includes buffers to protect the project completion date.

limited resources

Theory of Constraints (TOC): attempts to _ multitasking when resource works on more than one task at a time

minimize

buffer

additional time to complete a taskM

Murphy’s law

if something can go wrong, it will

Parkinsons’s law

work expands to fill the time allowed

Feeding buffer

additional time added before tasks on the critical path

Performance Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)

network analysis technique used to estimate project duration when there is a high degree of uncertainty about the individual activity duration estimates.