0.11 Project planning  (Page 10/21)

The quartet cancelled. They had another wedding that day.

Aunt Jane is supposed to sing at the service, but after what happened at her uncle’s funeral, I think I want someone else to do it.

Should we really have a pan flute player? I’m beginning to think it might be overkill.

Apparently! Maybe we should hold off printing the invitations until this stuff is worked out.

OK, let’s think about exactly how we want to do this. I think we need to be sure about how we want the service to go before we do any more printing.

The activity sequencing process

Now that we know what we have to do to make the wedding a success, we need to focus on the order of the work. Sally sat down with all of the activities she had defined for the wedding and decided to figure out exactly how they needed to happen. That’s where she used the activity sequencing process .

The activity attribute list Sally created had most of the predecessors and successors necessary written in it. This is where she thought of what comes first, second, third, etc. Sally’s milestone list had major pieces of work written down and there were a couple of changes to the scope she had discovered along the way that were approved and ready to go.

Creating the network diagram

The first step in developing the schedule is to develop a network diagram of the WBS work packages. The network diagram is a way to visualize the interrelationships of project activities. Network diagrams provide a graphical view of the tasks and how they relate to one another. The tasks in the network are the work packages of the WBS. All of the WBS tasks must be included in the network because they have to be accounted for in the schedule. Leaving even one task out of the network could change the overall schedule duration, estimated costs and resource allocation commitments.

The first step is to arrange the tasks from your WBS into a sequence ( [link] ). Some tasks can be accomplished at any time throughout the project where other tasks depend on input from another task or are constrained by time or resources.

The WBS is not a schedule, but it is the basis for it; the network diagram is a schedule but is used primarily to identify key scheduling information that ultimately goes into user friendly schedule formats, such as milestone and Gantt charts.

The network diagram provides important information to the project team. It provides information about how the tasks are related ( [link] ), where the risk points are in the schedule, how long it will take as currently planned to finish the project, and when each task needs to begin and end.