The road to the project’s final service or product is often paved with many interim deliverables—each of which must be complete in and of itself, of suitable quality and coordinated with all other deliverables, all while ensuring that: The quality level demanded by the client and primary stakeholders is maintained. The project deliverables are developed according to client specs and…
Task floats are generated by determining early and late scheduling of the tasks. The scheduling mechanism of the tasks is calculated in two steps: Calculate the earliest start date of each task, which is calculated from the beginning of the project forward. The earliest start date combined with the duration of the task defines the earliest finish date of the…
The ‘Critical Path’ is a sequence of connected tasks without any slack time (or ‘float’) between them. These tasks form the longest consecutive sequence of tasks in the project and thus determine the finish date of the project. Due to the lack of any slack time between tasks in the critical path, any deviation in one task causes a deviation…
The baseline plan has one important goal: to act as the field of reference for the various stakeholders, one to which they can compare the actual state of the project at any point in time. Therefore, as soon as the project is approved, the approved plan must be “frozen” to generate the project’s first reference point and enable project control…
Resource Control deals with keeping track of all the resources assigned to the project—specifically, the human resources. This is accomplished by looking at the resources from two directions simultaneously: The tasks to which the resources are assigned (task usage). The project resources used (resource usage). As part of the ‘task usage control process’, verify that all non-milestone and non-summary tasks…
Any project is made up of many different tasks. Some of these are derived from the project content and are included in the work plan. Others are routine, short-term tasks, which are often peripheral to the project itself but that are nonetheless necessary for its completion. These important but peripheral tasks require management and control, too, and can provide significant…
