Chapter 6: Time planning (Maylor) Flashcards
What does WBS stand for and what does it mean?
Work breakdoen strukture.
Deconstruction of a project (chunk the elephant)
- Gives people responsibility for each manageable
part
- Facilitates financial control, individual parts can have
their consumption of resources tracked
- Bottom level will be a list of work packages
What other “breakdowns” then WBS is there?
Functional breakdown
Physical breakdown
Whats important to ask yourself when constructing a time plan?
How long will it take to complete the project?
- How precise do you need to be?
- How long did it take last time?
- What could cause significant delay?
- What other tasks might get in the way?
Estimates are guesses
- Beware treating these numbers in a scientific way
- Estimation continues through the project lifecycle
- The nearer the completion, the more certainty about
time, resources and costs
What is AoN?
“Activity-on-node”. A project network that shows each activity as a node linked with arrows that show the immediate preceding activity.
What is EST, LST, Total float and critical path
EST - earliest start time - dertermined by the activities preceding the event and is the earliest time at which the activity on this node can start
LST - latest start time - is the same or later than EST and is the latest time at which all the previous activities need to have been completed to prevent the whole project being held up.
Total float - The difference between the LST and the EST
Critical path - the path between the activities that takes the longest.
Whats the positives and limitations with Gantt charts?
Pos
- Communicates the plan
- Easy to construct
- Readily understood
- Widely used
- Graphical interface for most project planning software
Limitations:
- Difficult to update manually
- Does not equate time and cost
- Does not help in optimising resource allocation
- Perceived as ‘statement of reality’
