Rob and Rebecca have decided to tie the knot, but they don’t have much time to plan their wedding. They want the big day to be unforgettable. They want to invite a lot of people and show them all a great time.

But just thinking about all of the details involved is overwhelming. Somewhere around picking the paper for the invitations, the couple realize they need help...

Rob: We want everything to be perfect.

Rebecca: There is so much to do! Invitations, food, guests, music...

Rob: Oh no, we haven’t even booked the place.

Rebecca: And it’s all got to be done right. We can’t print the invitations until we have the menu planned. We can’t do the seating arrangements until we have the RSVPs. We aren’t sure what kind of band to get for the reception, or should it be a DJ? We’re just overwhelmed.

Rob: My sister said you really saved her wedding. I know she gave you over a year to plan.

Rebecca: But I’ve always dreamed of a June wedding, and I’m not willing to give that up. I know it’s late, but can you help us?

Since there are so many different people involved in making the wedding go smoothly, it takes a lot of planning to make sure that all of the work happens in the right order, gets done by the right people, and doesn’t take too long. That’s what the Time Management knowledge area is all about.

Initially, Kathleen was worried that she didn’t have enough time to make sure everything was done properly. But she knew that she had some powerful time management tools on her side when she took the job, and they’ll help her make sure that everything will work out fine.

Time Management Magnets

You need to know the order of the time management processes for the exam. Luckily, they are pretty intuitive. Can you figure out the order?

Define Activities uses everything we already know about the project to divide the work into activities that can be estimated. The inputs for this process all come from the processes in the Scope Management and Integration Management knowledge areas. The first step in time management is figuring out how the project work breaks down into activities—and that’s what the Define Activities process is for.

Kathleen sat down and wrote down everything she knew about the project. She used the Activity List from her last wedding as a guide and then thought about the things that Rob and Rebecca wanted that were different from her past projects. She broke those things down into activities and pulled everything together into an activity list.

Note

Decomposition

This means taking the work packages you defined in the scope management processes and breaking them down even further into activities that can be estimated.

Templates

If your organization has done other projects similar to this one, you can probably use a template to come up with many of the activities that are necessary.

Expert judgment

Ask somebody who has done this before to give their opinion on what activities will be needed to get the job done.

Rolling wave planning

When you plan this way, you decompose only the activities that you need to plan for because they’re coming up soon first. You leave everything else planned at the milestone level until it gets closer to the time when you’ll do it

Sometimes you start a project without knowing a lot about the work that you’ll be doing later. Rolling wave planning lets you plan and schedule only the stuff that you know enough about to plan well.

If Kathleen were using rolling wave planning, she might write a schedule for only the tasks it takes to do the invitations and leave the planning for the menu and the seating up in the air until she knows who will RSVP.

Rob and Rebecca probably wouldn’t be happy hearing that Kathleen was only going to plan for the invitations to be sent, though. They want to know that their wedding is going to happen on time. That’s why rolling wave planning should only be used in cases where it’s not possible to plan any other way.

Think back to the definition of a project in Chapter 2. Remember how projects are progressively elaborated? Rolling wave planning takes advantage of the fact that you know more about the project as you go to make plans more accurate.

Activity Magnets

Here is part of a WBS. Arrange the activities underneath the WBS to show how the work items decompose into activities.

Activity Magnets Solution

Here is part of a WBS. Arrange the activities underneath the WBS to show how the work items decompose into activities.

The main output of this process is the activity list. It’s the basis for all of the estimation and scheduling tasks you will do next. But there are a few other outputs that go along with it and help to make the estimates more detailed and accurate.

Activity List

This is a list of everything that needs to be done to complete your project. This list is lower-level than the WBS. It’s all the activities that must be accomplished to deliver the work packages.

Activity Attributes

Here’s where the description of each activity is kept. All of the information you need to figure out the order of the work should be here, too. So any predecessor activities, successor activities, or constraints should be listed in the attributes along with descriptions and any other information about resources or time that you need for planning.

Milestone Lists

Note

Some milestones for the wedding:

• Invitations sent

• Menu finalized

• Church booked

• Bridesmaids’ dresses fitted

All of the important checkpoints of your project are tracked as milestones. Some of them could be listed in your contract as requirements of successful completion; some could just be significant points in the project that you want to keep track of. The milestone list needs to let everybody know which are required and which are not.

Rob: The quartet cancelled. They had another wedding that day.

Rebecca: Aunt Laura is supposed to do the reading at the service, but after what happened at Uncle Stu’s funeral, I think I want someone else to do it.

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

Rebecca: Maybe we should hold off printing the invitations until this stuff is worked out.

Kathleen: 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.

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. Kathleen 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 Sequence Activities process.

The activity attributes and the activity list she had created had most of the predecessors and successors necessary written in them. Her 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.

One way to visualize the way activities relate is to create a network diagram. Kathleen created this one to show how the activities involved in producing the invitations depend on one other.

For example, the calligrapher is the person who’s hired to write the addresses on the invitations, so Rob and Rebecca need to pick a calligrapher before the invitations can be addressed. But they also need to be printed before they can be addressed, because otherwise the calligrapher won’t have anything to write on! See how predecessors can get all complicated? Luckily, a diagram makes sense of them!

Showing the activities in rectangles and their relationships as arrows is called a Precedence Diagramming Method (PDM).

Just looking at the way all of these tasks relate to each other can help you figure out what’s important at any time in the project. Once Rob and Rebecca looked at the network diagram below, they realized they needed to get online and start looking for a venue for their wedding right away, even before they’d figured out their budget and guest list.

The most common kind of predecessor is the Finish to Start. It means that one task needs to be completed before another one can start. There are a few other kinds of predecessors, though. They can all be used in network diagrams to show the order of activities. The three main kinds of predecessor are Finish to Start (FS), Start to Start (SS), and Finish to Finish (FF).

Sometimes you need to give some extra time between activities. Lag time is when you purposefully put a delay between the predecessor task and the successor. For example, when the bride and her father dance, everybody waits a while before they join them.

Lead time is when you give a successor task some time to get started before the predecessor finishes. So you might want the caterer preparing dessert an hour before everybody is eating dinner.

You should still think of things in sequence.

For the test, it’s important to know the order of these processes. And, even though you might do it all at once, you probably spend some time thinking about each of these things.

As you sequence the activities, you will find new activities that need to be added and new attributes for activities that you didn’t know about. So, while the main product of this process is the network diagram, you also produce changes to some of the Define Activities documents.

Getting a handle on all of the tasks that have to be done is a great start. But it’s not enough to know the tasks and the order they come in. Before you can put a schedule together, you need to know who is going to do each job, and the things they need available to them in order to do it! Those are resources, and getting a handle on them is a very important part of time management.

Good news: you’ve already seen most of the inputs to the Estimate Activity Resources process already! Before you can assign resources to your project, you need to know which ones you’re authorized to use on your project. That’s an input, and it’s called Resource Calendars. You’ll also need the activity list that you created earlier, and you’ll need to know about how your organization typically handles resources. Once you’ve got a handle on these things, you’re set for resource estimation.

The goal of Estimate Activity Resources is to assign resources to each activity in the activity list. There are five tools and techniques for the Estimate Activity Resources process. Some of them have technical-sounding names, but they’re all actually pretty sensible when you think about it. They should all make sense to you when you think about what you have to do when you have to figure out what resources your project needs.

Expert Judgment means bringing in experts who have done this sort of work before and getting their opinions on what resources are needed.

Published Estimating Data is something that project managers in a lot of industries use to help them figure out how many resources they need. They rely on articles, books, journals, and periodicals that collect, analyze, and publish data from other people’s projects.

Alternatives Analysis means considering several different options for how you assign resources. This includes varying the number of resources as well as the kind of resources you use.

Project Management Software like Microsoft Project will often have features designed to help project managers play around with resources and constraints and find the best combination of assignments for the project.

Bottom-Up Estimating is a technique that you may have used before without even knowing it! It means breaking down complex activities into pieces, and working out the resource assignments for each of those simpler pieces using the other four tools and techniques.

Once you’re done with Estimate Activity Resources, you’ve got everything you need to figure out how long each activity will take. That’s done in a process called Estimate Activity Durations. This is where you look at each activity in the activity list, consider the scope and the resources, and estimate how long it will take to perform.

Estimating the duration of an activity means starting with the information you have about that activity and the resources that are assigned to it, and then working with the project team to come up with an estimate. Most of the time you’ll start with a rough estimate and then refine it (maybe a few times!) to make it more accurate. You’ll use these five tools and techniques to create the most accurate estimates.

Expert Judgment will come from your project team members who are familiar with the work that has to be done. If you don’t get their opinion, then there’s a huge risk that your estimates will be wrong!

Parametric Estimating means plugging data about your project into a formula, spreadsheet, database, or computer program that comes up with an estimate. The software or formula that you use for parametric estimating is built on a database of actual durations from past projects.

Analogous Estimating is when you look at activities from previous projects that were similar to this one and look at how long it took to do similar work before. But this only works if the activities and the project team are similar!

Three-Point Estimates are when you come up with three numbers: a realistic estimate that’s most likely to occur, an optimistic one that represents the best-case scenario, and a pessimistic one that represents the worst-case scenario. The final estimate is the average.

Reserve Analysis means adding extra time to the schedule (called a contingency reserve or a buffer) to account for extra risk.

Three-Point Estimates Up Close

PERT (Project Evaluation Review Technique) is the most common form of three-point estimation. It’s a technique that was developed in the 1960s by consulting firms working with the U.S. Government as a way of getting more accurate project duration predictions up front. To do a PERT estimate, you start with three estimates—pessimistic, most likely, and optimistic estimates. Since the pessimistic and optimistic estimates are less likely to happen than the the normal estimate, the normal estimate is weighted (by multiplying it by 4) and added to the optimistic and pessimistic estimates, and then the whole thing is divided by 6 to give an expectued duration. The formula looks like this:

Kathleen used a PERT estimate for the all of the wedding planning activities to make sure that she could get it all done in time for Rob and Rebecca’s big day. They only have six months until the wedding, so all of the planning needs to be done within the month to leave enough time to actually get everything done. She wrote down the assumptions she made for the each estimate, coming up with all of the reasons she could think of that she took into account when coming up with her estimates.

Note

An assumption is a decision that you make to account for things you don’t know when you make an estimate.

You’ve got a list of activities, you know what resources are needed to actually do each activity, and you’ve got your estimation tools and techniques... now you have enough to create the estimates! That’s the whole point of the Estimate Activity Durations process, and it’s also the main output.

The Activity Duration Estimates are estimates of how long each activity in the activity list will take. The estimate can be in hours, days, weeks... any work period is fine, and you’ll use different work periods for different jobs. A small job (like booking a DJ) may just take a few hours; a bigger job (like catering—including deciding on a menu, ordering ingredients, cooking food, and serving guests on the big day) could take days.

You’ll also learn more about the specific activities while you’re estimating them. That’s something that always happens—you have to really think through all of the aspects of a task in order to estimate it. So the other output of Estimate Activity Durations is updates to the Activity Attributes.

You may have guessed from the name that the Activity Durations Estimates are always duration estimates, not effort estimates, so they show you calendar time and not just person-hours.

Kathleen’s really got a handle on how long things are going to take, but that’s not enough to get the job done. She’s still got some work to do before she’s got the whole project under control.

Rob and Rebecca know where they want to get married, and they’ve got the place booked now.

But what about the caterer? They have no idea who’s going to be providing the food.

And what about the band that they want? Will the timing with their schedule work out?

The Develop Schedule process is the core of time management. It’s the process where you put it all together—where you take everything you’ve done so far and combine it into one final schedule for the whole project. A lot of project managers consider this the most important part of their job. The schedule is your most important tool for managing a project.

Don’t worry, even though you’re done with the Estimate Activity Resources process, you’re not done with the resources.

You’re never going to have the complete resource picture until you’re done building the schedule. And the same goes for your activity list and duration estimates, too! It’s only when you lay out the schedule that you’ll figure out that some of your activities and durations didn’t quite work.

Rebecca: Well, let’s see. What menu did we give to the caterers?

Rob: We didn’t give it to them yet, because we won’t have the final menu until everyone RSVPs and lets us know which entrée they want.

Rebecca: But they can’t RSVP because we haven’t sent out the invitations! What’s holding that up?

Rob: We’re still waiting to get them back from the printer. We can’t send them out if we don’t have them yet!

Rebecca: Oh no! I still have to tell the printer what to print on the invitations, and what paper to use.

Rob: But you were waiting on that until we finished the guest list.

Rebecca: What a mess!

The Critical Path Method is an important tool for keeping your projects on track. Every network diagram has something called the critical path. It’s the string of activities that, if you add up all of the durations, is longer than any other path through the network. It usually starts with the first activity in the network and usually ends with the last one.

The reason that the critical path is, well, critical, is that every single activity on the path must finish on time in order for the project to come in on time. A delay in any one of the critical path activities will cause the entire project to be delayed.

It’s easy to find the critical path in any project! With a little practice, you’ll get the hang of it. Of course, on a large project with dozens or hundreds of tasks, you’ll probably use software like Microsoft Project to find the critical path for you. But when it does, it’s following the same exact steps that you’ll follow here.

The critical path is the one with the longest duration!

Exercise

You may get questions on the exam asking you to identify the critical path in a network diagram. Here’s some practice for doing that! Find the critical path and duration for this PDM.

Answers in Exercise Solutions.

Once you’ve figured out the critical path, there’s all sorts of useful stuff you can do with it. One of the most useful things you can do is calculate the float. The float for any activity is the amount of time that it can slip before it causes your project to be delayed. You might also see the word “slack” – it’s the same thing.

Luckily, it’s not hard to figure out the float for any activity in a network diagram. First you write down the list of all of the paths in the diagram, and you identify the critical path. The float for every activity in the critical path is zero.

Once you know the float, you know how much play you have in your schedule. If an activity has a float of 2 days, it can slip by that much without affecting the end date.

Exercise

You’ll need to be able to calculate the float of an activity in a network diagram for the exam. Take another look at this PDM from the last exercise. Can you calculate the float for each activity?

1. What is the float for each activity on the critical path? ____

2. What is the total duration for path A → B → C → G? ____

3. What is the total duration for path A → B → F → G? ____

4. What is the total duration for path D → E → F → G? ____

5. What is the total duration for path D → H → I? ____

6. Which path is the critical path? ____ → ____ → ____ → ____

7. Write down the float for each activity:

   Note

   Hint: First fill in the float for the critical path activities. Then move on to the next-longest path, and then the next-longest one, filling in any float that hasn’t been filled in yet.

   A ____ B ____ C ____ D ____ E ____

   F ____ G ____ H ____ I ____

Answers in Exercise Solution.

Coming up with the float for each activity is useful, but you can actually do better! When you have a long critical path, but the other paths in your network diagram are short, then you have a lot of freedom in when you can start and finish each of the activities that are not on the critical path. You can use early start and early finish to get a handle on exactly how much freedom you have in your schedule.

It’s also important to know how late any activity can run before it delays the project. That’s what late start and late finish are for! They let you figure out how late you can start a certain task and how much it can slip before it delays your project.

You can use a method called forward pass to add the early start and finish to each path in your network diagram. Once you’ve done that, you can use backward pass to add the late start and finish. It makes your network diagrams look a little more complicated, but it gives you a lot of valuable information.

Take a forward pass through the network diagram. Start at the beginning of the critical path and move forward through each activity. Follow these three steps to figure out the early start and early finish!

You can use a backward pass through the same network diagram to figure out the late finish and start for each activity.

The backward pass is just as easy as the forward pass. Start at the end of the path you just took a pass through and work your way backward to figure out the late start and finish.

Start with the critical path. You’re calculating the latest any activity can start and finish, so it makes sense that you need to start at the end of the project and work backward—and the last activity on the critical path is always the last one in the project. Then do these three steps, working backwards to the next-longest path, then the next-longest, etc., until you’ve filled in the LS and LF for all of the activities. Fill in the LF and LS for the activities on each path, but don’t replace any LF or LS you’ve already calcualted.

All of this critical path stuff seems pretty serious, right? It’s one of the toughest concepts on the exam. But don’t sweat it, because it’s actually not hard! It just takes a little practice. Once you do it yourself, you’ll see that there’s really nothing to worry about.

Sharpen your pencil

There are four paths in this network diagram. Fill in each of the activity names and durations for each of the paths.

We’re not done yet! There’s more on the next page...

Sharpen your pencil

Take a forward pass through each of the four paths in the diagram and fill in the early starts and early finishes for each activity. Start with the first one.

Let’s move on to the second path.

The next path isn’t as straightforward as it looks. Start by filling in its values.

Now take another look at it, and how it mixes with the last path. It includes activity H, which was also in the last path. H will have a different ES depending on which path you use! So which predecessor do you use – E or G? The idea here is that you use the predecessor with the larger EF value when you calculate the ES for activity H (because you want the latest possible start date).

You’ve calculated the ES for each activity. Use that information and take a backward pass through the paths, starting with the first two paths.

First start with the critical path. Take the EF of the last activity in the critical path and use it as the LF for the last activity in every path. If you take a minute to think about it, it makes sense to do that. The point of LF is to figure out the absolute latest that the activity can end without making the project late. And as long as every non-critical-path activity ends before the last activity in the critical path, then they won’t be late.

We’ll start by giving you the LF of critical path, Start-D-E-H-Finish, which is 17.

Finish up by calculating the LS and LF for the last two paths!

Activities B and D have two possible choices for which LS to use for the calculation. For activity B, do you use the LS of C or the LS of F? And for activity D, do you use the activity E or G? The answer is that you always use the lowest value of LS to calculate the LF. The reason is that you’re trying to find the latest possible start date that won’t make the project late. If you use an activity with a later LS, and the activity really is delayed by that much, then it’ll cause a delay in both following activities. And that will make the one with the lower LS start too late.

Sharpen your pencil Solution

For the exam, you’ll only have to do one or two of these calculations, not a whole string of them like this. You’ll definitely be able to handle the exam questions now!

You won’t have to do this kind of thing on the job... that’s what computers are for!

Project management software like Microsoft Project will do these calculations for you. But you need to know how to do it yourself, because when the computer is doing critical path analysis, this is exactly how it figures it out!

There are two important schedule compression techniques that you can use to bring in your project’s milestone dates...but each has its own cost. When you absolutely have to meet the date and you are running behind, you can sometimes find ways to do activities more quickly by adding more resources to critical path tasks. That’s called crashing.

Then you can’t crash the schedule.

There’s no way to crash a schedule without raising the overall cost of the project. So, if the budget is fixed and you don’t have any extra money to spend, you can’t use this technique.

Another schedule compression technique is called fast-tracking. Sometimes you’ve got two activities planned to occur in sequence, but you can actually do them at the same time. On a software project, you might do both your UAT testing and your functional testing at the same time, for example. This is pretty risky, though. There’s a good chance you might need to redo some of the work you have done concurrently.

It’s always a good idea to think about all of the things that could go wrong on your project in advance.

That way, you can figure out how to deal with any problems that might come your way. Sometimes there’s no way to still meet your dates and deal with these scenarios. But it always makes sense to try to understand the impact they will have on your schedule.

Monte Carlo Analysis

This is a specific kind of what-if analysis where you model uncertainty using a computer. There are some packages that will help to calculate risk using random numbers and Monte Carlo algorithms. While this is not a commonly used technique, there might be a question or two about it on the PMP exam, and you should know what it is.

Scheduling Tool

Using a project management software package to create a model of the schedule and adjust various elements to see what might happen is another technique for analyzing network diagrams.

There are just a few more tools and techniques in the Develop Schedule process that you should know.

Performance Reviews

One of the most common ways to do this is to use the critical chain method. In this method, resource dependencies are used to determine the critical path. Then, buffers are added working backwards from the delivery date into the schedule at strategic points, and the project is managed so that each milestone is hit on time.

Resource Leveling

Sometimes only one resource can do a given activity. If that resource is busy doing another activity on the critical path, the path itself needs to change to include that dependency. That’s the point of resource leveling. It evaluates all of the resources to see if the critical path needs to change to accommodate resource assignments.

Adjusting Leads and Lags

If you made any mistakes in your leads and your lags, you might be able to adjust them to change the projected end date.

Note

And don’t forget...

Schedule Compression and Schedule Network Analysis

The last two tools and techniques in the Develop Schedule process are the ones you just learned over the last few pages: schedule compression and schedule network analysis.

Of course, the main product of Develop Schedule is the schedule. But there are a few other supporting documents that help you understand how the work will get done as well.

Project Schedule

All of that analysis and modeling should produce a schedule that everyone can get behind. After thinking your way through everything that can go wrong and assigning resources, you should have a pretty accurate prediction of the work required to complete the project.

Note

The reason you go through all of that what-if analysis is to make sure everybody agrees that this schedule is achievable!

Milestone List

Technically, the milestone list is a part of the project schedule (so they’re really all part of the same output), but it’s very important. All of the major chunks of work can be marked with milestones to track their completion. Usually this list is published for other teams or stakeholders who are depending on parts of the work to be accomplished by a certain time.

Schedule Data

The schedule data is a colletion of information about your schedule. It will include things that you’ll need to analyze your schedule later on in the project: alternative schedules, specific requirements for resources, milestone charts, bar charts, project schedule network diagrams, and other data and metrics about your schedule

Before you can do change control, you need requested changes. Once the change is approved, you can update the baseline!

Updates and Requested Changes

In the course of developing the schedule, you will find changes to your resource requirements, activity attributes, and project calendars. Some changes may affect your overall plan for handling all other areas of project management. In that case, the Project Management Plan will need to be updated. (You’ll also update the Risk Register—you’ll learn all about that in Chapter 11.)

What’s My Purpose

Q:

For the exam, you need to know Develop Schedule outputs. Several outputs from the wedding’s Develop Schedule process are on the left. Match them to the correct description on the right. A. Project Schedule 1. Kathleen gives a list of dates to the caterer telling him when he will need to have his menu plans and when the shopping for the ingredients will need to be complete for the Reception and Rehearsal Dinner. B. Schedule Data 2. Kathleen realizes that she needs to make a change to how she keeps track of the waiters’ time, so she makes a change to the document that describes it. C. Schedule Baseline 3. While making the schedule, Kathleen realizes that she is going to need a lot more waiters. D. Update to Resource Requirements 4. Kathleen makes a copy of the schedule when it’s done so that she can compare how she is doing to the original plan. E. Project Document Updates 5. There’s a big poster on the wall where Kathleen keeps track of who does what, and when.

A:

Answers: A - 5; B - 1; C -4; D - 3; E - 2

There are no Dumb Questions

Q:	Q: Don’t we need to go through change control before we update the resource requirements or the activity attributes?
A:	A: No. You need to go through change control if you are requesting changes to, say, your cost management plan. But while you are working on creating your schedule, everything you have created as part of the Time Management knowledge area is fair game. As you work your way through your network diagram and figure out new dependencies, you are going to find that you need more resources for some items or that the activity itself has changed. That’s why this process gives you the freedom to refine your earlier idea and make all of the time management documents in sync with your new understanding. The Develop Schedule process is about taking all of the information you are able to think of up front and putting it into a schedule that is realistic. When you are done with this process, you should have a really good idea of what you are going to do, who will do it, and how long it will take.
Q:	Q: We always want to do our projects as quickly as we can. Why don’t we always fast-track and crash our schedules?
A:	A: Because crashing is expensive and fast-tracking is risky. While it may look good on paper to add a lot of resources to a project that is running late, it often adds so much management overhead and training issues that the project just comes in later. Even though it might seem like some predecessors are really unnecessary, you usually planned them for a reason. So when you break your dependencies to fast-track your project, you can significantly compromise the quality of the work that gets done. That means you might have to redo it altogether—which would probably take a lot of time. While fast-tracking and crashing might work sometimes, they always add both risk and cost to your project.
Q:	Q: Do people really do Monte Carlo Analysis to figure out their schedules? I have never heard of that before.
A:	A: It’s true that most people don’t use this technique to figure out what might go wrong on their projects, so don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it. Some people think that this is just one of those things that is on the PMP exam, so you have to know what it is. But there really are some project managers who use it and get great results!
Q:	Q: Critical Chain sounds complicated. Do I need to know how to do it?
A:	A: Not really. You need to know that it is a technique for developing schedules that takes resource assignment into account early on. When project managers use the Critical Chain method, they identify strategic points to put buffers in their schedule and then manage the size of the buffers so that each milestone in the schedule is met. Don’t worry, you won’t be asked to create a schedule using this technique. You just need to know the definition.

Updates refine the outputs of previous processes so you don’t have to go back and redo them.

Kathleen doesn’t just sit around and wait for schedule changes to happen...

Joe (on phone): Good afternoon, Joe’s Catering. Joe speaking. How can I help you?

Kathleen: Hello, Joe. This is Kathleen calling about Rob and Rebecca’s wedding.

Joe: Oh, Hi! Everything’s going fine with that wedding.

Kathleen: Are you sure? What about that big convention across town that’s going to be happening at the same time? Won’t it be tough to find waiters in June?

Joe: I didn’t think of that; we’d better start figuring out how we’ll handle it now.

As the project work is happening, you can always discover new information that makes you re-evaluate your plan, and use the Control Schedule process to make the changes. The inputs to Control Schedule cover the various ways you can discover that information. The outputs are the changes themselves.

All of the stuff you made during the Develop Schedule process gets updated using the Control Schedule process. Here’s a closer look at what those updates mean.

Most often, changes are identified through looking at performance data. It’s just as important once you make a change to gather performance data as it was when you found the change in the first place. Here’s how performance data feeds into the Control Schedule process.

The tools and techniques for Control Schedule are all about figuring out where your project schedule stands. By comparing your actual project to the schedule you laid out in the baseline and looking at how people are performing, you can figure out how to handle every schedule change.

Variance Analysis

Use this to take stock of where your project is right now and compare that against what you’d planned to do in the baseline. If there’s a big difference there, you know there’s a problem!

Performance Reviews

There are two important calculations called Schedule Variance (SV) and Schedule Performance Index (SPI) that give you valuable information about how your project is doing. You’ll learn all about them in the next chapter.

Adjusting Leads and Lags, What-if analysis, Schedule Compression

Most of the tools from the last process apply to this one too. As you find variances in the schedule, you need to figure out the impact of those issues and change your schedule to account for the new information.

Progress Reporting

Most project managers have probably done a lot of progress reporting! It’s one of those things that most people think of when they think of project management. It’s when you create a report that says what the team has done, what milestones you’ve reached, and what’s left to be done. You’ll usually use a report template for this.

Project Management Software

This is software like Microsoft Project that helps you organize and analyze all of the information you need to evaluate the schedule of any project.

Resource Leveling

As things change in your project, you need to make sure that resources are covering all of the activities in your plan. That means you need to distribute resources so that the work that needs to get done always has a resource to available to do it.

Remember, Gantt charts—the bar charts you make with MS Project—are just one tool for scheduling. You may use them a lot in your day-to-day work, but they’re only one piece of time management. And remember, on the exam they’re called bar charts, not Gantt charts!

Control Schedule Magnets

You’ll see change control over and over again—every single knowledge area has its own change control process! Luckily, you’ll start to see how similar they all are. But Control Schedule has its own quirks, and they’re important for understanding Time Management.

Answers in Control Schedule Magnets Answers.

Timecross

Take some time to sit back and give your right brain something to do. It’s your standard crossword; all of the solution words are from this chapter.

Across

Down

1. Taking work packages from the WBS and breaking them down into activities. 5. The “P” in PDM. 7. The kind of analysis where you ask a lot of questions about possibilities. 8. A snapshot of the schedule that you can use for later comparison. 10. __________ estimation means plugging data about your project into a database of historical information to get an estimate of how long it will take to do the work. 12. Giving a successor task some time to start before a predecessor finishes. 13. Adding more resources to a project so you can get it done faster is called _______ the schedule. 14. A PERT three-point estimate is optimistic time + 4 × most likely time + _______ time.

2. Any delay in an activity on the _______ path will delay the entire project. 3. You do this sort of planning when you get more information as the project progresses. 4. What you’re doing to resources when you evaluate all of them to see if the critical path needs to change to accommodate their restrictions. 6. An activity with a dependency on something outside the project has an _________ predecessor. 9. ________ Activities is the proces where you put the activities in order. 11. How long an activity can slip before the whole project is delayed.

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Exercise Solutions

You may get questions on the exam asking you to identify the critical path in a network diagram. You had to practice that by finding the critical path and duration for this PDM.

Sharpen your pencil Solution

You’ll need to know how to turn a table of nodes into a network diagram, so here’s your chance to get some practice! Here’s a list of nodes for a PDM network diagram. Try drawing the diagram based on it:

Name	Predecessor
Start	—
A	Start
B	A
C	B
D	Start
E	D
F	B
G	C
H	D
I	E, H
Finish	F, G, I

Now try another one!

Name	Predecessor
Start	—
1	Start
2	1
3	2
4	Start
5	3
6	Start
7	6
Finish	7, 4, 5

Control Schedule Magnets Answers

You’ll see change control over and over again—every single knowledge area has its own change control process! Luckily, you’ll start to see how similar they all are. But Control Schedule has its own quirks, and they’re important for understanding Time Management.

Timecross solution

Exam Questions

1. You’re managing a project, when your client tells you that an external problem happened, and now you have to meet an earlier deadline. Your supervisor heard that in a situation like this, you can use schedule compression by either crashing or fast-tracking the schedule, but he’s not sure which is which. What do you tell him?

1. Crashing the project adds risk, while fast-tracking adds cost

2. When you crash a project, it always shortens the total duration of the project

3. Crashing the project adds cost, while fast-tracking adds risk

4. When you fast-track a project, it always shortens the total duration of the project

2. Given this portion of the network diagram to the right, what’s the ES of activity F?

1. 9

2. 10

3. 12

4. 13

3. Given this portion of the network diagram to the right, what’s the LF of activity F?

1. 10

2. 11

3. 16

4. 17

4. You are managing a software project. Your QA manager tells you that you need to plan to have her team start their test planning activity so that it finishes just before testing begins. But other than that, she says it can start as late in the project as necessary. What’s the relationship between the test planning activity and the testing activity?

1. Start-to-Start (SS)

2. Start-to-finish (SF)

3. Finish-to-Start (FS)

4. Finish-to-Finish (FF)

5. You’re managing an industrial design project. You’ve come up with the complete activity list, created network diagrams, assigned resources to each activity, and estimated their durations. What’s the next thing that you do?

1. Use Rolling Wave Planning to compensate for the fact that you don’t have complete information

2. Create the schedule

3. Consult the project scope statement and perform Sequence Activities

4. Use fast-tracking to reduce the total duration

6. Which of the following is NOT an input to Develop Schedule?

1. Activity list

2. Project schedule network diagrams

3. Resource calendars

4. Schedule baseline

7. Three members of your project team want to pad their estimates because they believe there are certain risks that might materialize. What is the BEST way to handle this situation?

1. Estimate the activities honestly, and then use a contingency reserve to cover any unexpected costs

2. Allow more time for the work by adding a buffer to every activity in the schedule

3. Tell the team members not to worry about it, and if the schedule is wrong it’s okay for the project to be late

4. Crash the schedule

8. Which of the following tools is used for adding buffers to a schedule?

1. Three-point estimates

2. Critical chain method

3. Expert judgment

4. Critical path analysis

9. What is the critical path in the activity list to the right?

1. Start-A-B-C-Finish

2. Start-A-D-E-F-Finish

3. Start-G-H-I-J-Finish

4. Start-A-B-J-Finish

10. What is the float for activity F in the activity list to the right?

1. 0

2. 7

3. 8

4. 10

Name	Predecessor	Duration
Start	—	—
A	Start	6
B	A	4
C	B	8
D	A	1
E	D	1
F	E	2
G	Start	3
H	G	3
I	H	2
J	B, I	3
Finish	F, J, C	—

11. You’re managing an interior decoration project, when you find out that you need to get it done earlier than originally planned. You decide to fast-track the project. This means:

1. Starting the project sooner and working overtime

2. Assigning more people to the tasks at a greater total cost, especially for activities on the critical path

3. Starting activities earlier and overlapping them more, which will cost more and could add risks

4. Shortening the durations of the activities and asking people to work overtime to accommodate that.

12. Slack is a synonym for:

1. Float

2. Lag

3. Buffer

4. Reserve

13. You’re managing a construction project. You’ve decomposed work packages into activities, and your client needs a duration estimate for each activity that you come up with. Which of the following will you use for this?

1. Milestone list

2. Activity list

3. Critical path analysis

4. Project schedule network diagram

14. What’s the correct order of the Time Management planning processes?

1. Sequence Activities, Define Activities, Estimate Activity Resources, Estimate Activity Durations, Develop Schedule

2. Define Activities, Sequence Activities, Develop Schedule, Estimate Activity Resources, Estimate Activity Durations

3. Define Activities, Sequence Activities, Estimate Activity Resources, Estimate Activity Durations, Develop Schedule

4. Develop Schedule, Define Activities, Sequence Activities, Estimate Activity Resources, Estimate Activity Durations

15. Which of the following is NOT a tool or technique used in Estimate Activity Durations?

1. SWAG Estimation

2. Parametric Estimation

3. Analogous Estimation

4. Three-Point Estimation

16. You’re managing a project to build a new project management information system. You work with the team to come up with an estimate of 27 weeks. In the best case, this could be shortened by two weeks because you can reuse a previous component. But there’s a risk that a vendor delay could cause the project to be delayed by five weeks. Use PERT to calculate a three-point estimate for this project.

1. 25.83 weeks

2. 26 weeks

3. 27.5 weeks

4. 28.3 weeks

17. Given the network diagram below, what’s the critical path?

1. Start-A-B-C-End

2. Start-A-D-G-End

3. Start-E-D-C-End

4. Start-E-F-G-End

18. For that same network diagram below, what’s the float for activity A?

1. 0 weeks

2. 1 week

3. 2 weeks

4. 4 weeks

19. For that same network diagram below, what’s the float for activity E?

1. 0 weeks

2. 1 week

3. 2 weeks

4. 4 weeks

20. You’re managing a software project, when your customer informs you that a schedule change is necessary. Which is the BEST thing to do?

1. Consult the schedule management plan

2. Notify the team and the sponsor that there’s going to be a schedule change

3. Influence the factors that cause change

4. Refuse to make the change because there’s already a schedule baseline

21. Your company has previously run other projects similar to the one you’re currently managing. What is the BEST way to use that information?

1. Check the organizational process assets for lessons learned and other information about the past projects

2. Use parametric estimation to estimate your project based on past projects’ performance

3. Start from scratch because you don’t want mistakes from past projects to influence you

4. Reuse the project management plan from a past project

22. You’re planning the schedule for a highway construction project, but the final date you came up with will run into the next budget year. The state comes up with capital from a reserve fund, and now you can increase the budget for your resources. What’s the BEST way to compress the schedule?

1. Go back to your three-point estimates and use the most optimistic ones

2. Use the extra budget to increase your contingency reserve

3. Hire more experts to use expert judgment so your estimates are more accurate

4. Crash the schedule

23. You’re managing a software project. You’ve created the schedule, and you need to figure out which activities absolutely cannot slip. You’ve done critical path analysis, identifying the critical path and calculating the early start and early finish for each activity. Which activities cannot slip without making the project late?

1. The ones with the biggest difference between ES and LF

2. The activities on the critical path

3. The activity with the most lag

4. The last activity in the project, because it has no float

24. You’re managing a construction project. You’ve decomposed work packages into activities, and your client needs a duration estimate for each activity that you came up with. Which of the following BEST describes what you are doing?

1. Evaluating each activity to figure out how much effort it will take

2. Estimating the number of person-hours that will be required for each activity

3. Understanding, in calendar time, how long each activity will take

4. Estimating how many people it will take to perform each activity

Exam Answers

1. Answer: C

You’ll definitely get some questions that ask you about crashing and fast-tracking, and it’s important to know the difference between them. When you crash the project, it means that you add resources to it, especially to the critical path. There’s no real risk in doing that—in the worst-case scenario, the extra people just sit around!—but it does cost more. Fast-tracking means adjusting the schedule so that activities overlap. The same resources are doing the work, so it’s not going to cost more, but it’s definitely riskier, because now you’ve eliminated buffers and possibly broken some dependencies! And remember that crashing or fast-tracking won’t always work to make the project go faster!

2. Answer: D

Calculating the early start (ES) of an activity isn’t hard. All you need to do is look at the early finish (EF) of the previous activity and add one. If there’s more than one predecessor, then you take the largest EF and add one. In this case, the predecessors to activity F are D, with an EF of 9, and E, with an EF of 12. So the ES of F is 12 + 1 = 13.

3. Answer: A

It’s just as easy to calculate the late finish (LF). Look at the following activity, take its LS (late start), and subtract one. If there’s more than one following activity, use the one with the lowest LS. So for activity F in the question, the following activities are G, with an LS of 17, and H, with an LS of 11. So the LF of F is 11 - 1 = 10.

4. Answer: C

Don’t let the jargon fool you! You don’t need to know anything about software testing to answer this question. When you have two activities, and the first activity has to be timed so that it finishes before the second one starts, then you’ve got a Finish-to-Start relationship, or FS.

5. Answer: B

Note

Did answer A trick you? No need for rolling wave planning when you’ve got enough info to define all the activities!

This is a Which-is-next question that describes a project that’s completed the Define Activities, Sequence Activities, Estimate Activity Resources, and Estimate Activity Durations processes. The next process in Time Management is Develop Schedule, which means that the next thing you do is create the schedule!

6. Answer: D

The schedule baseline is an output of the Develop Schedule process, not an input. You should definitely know what goes into the schedule baseline: it’s a specific version of the schedule that you set aside and use for comparison later on, when you want to know if the project is running late.

7. Answer: A

You always want to be honest with your estimates. Every project has unknowns and risks, and there’s no way to estimate any activity exactly! Luckily, we have tools to deal with this. You can use reserve analysis, a tool of Estimate Activity Durations, to come up with a contingency reserve that you can use to plan for these risks.

8. Answer: B

Critical chain method is a technique that’s part of Develop Schedule that lets you figure out how to handle the problems that come with having limited resources. You use it to shuffle both activities and resources on your critical path. One important aspect of the critical chain method is that you can use it to add buffers to the schedule to reduce the risk of certain activities.

9. Answer: A

When you draw out a network diagram for the activities in the table, you end up with four paths. And you definitely should draw out the activity diagram for a question like this! You’re allowed to use scratch paper on the exam, and this is one place where you should definitely do it. Of the four paths, only one has the longest duration: Start-A-B-C-Finish, which has a duration of 6+ 4 + 8 = 18. That’s the critical path.

10. Answer: C

Activity F is in the path Start-A-D-E-F-Finish. This path has a duration of 6 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 10. The float of an activity is the longest time it can slip before it affects the critical path. In this case, activity F can slip by 8 without causing the path that it’s on to go beyond the critical path. But any more than that, and its path becomes the new critical path!

Note

Did you notice answer A? Don’t forget that the float of any activity in the critical path is zero!

11. Answer: C

This is the definition of fast-tracking, and you’re probably getting the hang of this one by now. You may get a question like this, but you’ll almost certainly see fast-tracking as an incorrect answer to several questions!

12. Answer: A

Remember that when you see “slack,” it’s the same thing as float. Either term could appear on the exam!

13. Answer: B

This question is asking about the Estimate Activity Durations process. Take a look at the answers—there’s only one answer that’s used in that process: you need to start with the activity list in order to do the estimates for the activities! The other answers are things that are inputs, tools, or techniques for other processes.

Note

When a question asks what you’d use for a process, it’s asking you to pick an input, tool, or technique that’s part of the process.

14. Answer: C

It’s not hard to remember the order in which the Time Management processes are performed. If you use a little common sense, you can reason your way through a question like this. You need to define your activities before you can sequence them, you need to know who’s going to be doing an activity before you can estimate how long it’s going to take, and you need to do all of that before you can build a schedule!

Note

Control Schedule isn’t included in the list of processes because if a schedule change happens, you’ll have to go back and revisit the other Time Management processes. So it doesn’t have a specific order!

15. Answer: A

You’ll have to know the different kinds of estimating techniques for the exam. You don’t necessarily have to be good at doing them, but you should recognize which are which. Parametric estimating is when you plug values into a formula, program, or spreadsheet and get an estimate. Analogous estimating uses similar activities from past projects to calculate new estimates. Three-point estimating uses an optimistic, pessimistic, and realistic estimate.

16. Answer: C

This question is asking you to apply the PERT three-point estimation formula: (Optimistic Time + 4 × Most Likely Time + Pessimistic Time) ÷ 6. When a question gives you these values directly, it’s easy. But in this case, to answer the question you had to figure out the values for the Optimistic Time and Pessimistic Time, which meant that you needed to look at the assumptions that the team was making. The most likely time was given: 27 weeks. The best case scenario would come in two weeks earlier, at 25 weeks, and the worst case would come in five weeks late, at 32 weeks. So the estimate is (25 weeks + 4 × (27 weeks) + 32 weeks) ÷ 6 = 27.5 weeks.

Note

Sometimes you’ll get a question about applying a formula, but you’ll need to read the text in the question to figure out all of the variables

17. Answer: C

The path Start-E-D-C-End has a duration of 8 + 2 + 4 = 14, which is the longest total duration in the entire network.

18. Answer: B

Activity A is on three different paths: Start-A-B-C-End (13), Start-A-D-C-End (12), and Start-A-D-G-End (9). To calculate its float, you take the longest path’s length and subtract it from the lenth of the critical path: 14 - 13 = 1.

19. Answer: A

Note

Can you think of how a question might quiz you on this information without actually asking you to look at a network diagram?

Since activity E is on the critical path, its float is zero, because the float of any activity on the critical path is zero.

20. Answer: A

The schedule management plan tells you how changes to the schedule are to be handled. Any time there’s a change, the first thing you should do is consult the plan to see how it should be handled.

21. Answer: A

The organizational process assets contain historical information about past projects. When you write up your lessons learned, or create work performance information, you store it in your company’s organizational process asset library! Also, did you notice that answer B was the wrong definition of parametric estimation?

22. Answer: D

Crashing the schedule is the form of schedule compression that increases cost. This is a difficult question because all of the answers sound good, and one or two are a little misleading! Don’t fall into the trap of choosing an answer because you recognize a valid tool or technique in it. Reserve analysis and three-point estimates are very useful techniques, but they’re not the answer to this question.

23. Answer: B

The critical path is the path in the network diagram where any delay will cause a delay in the schedule. These are the activities that cannot slip without making the project late!

24. Answer: C

This question was really about the definition of “duration,” and the key to answering it is to understand how duration is different from effort. The correct answer talks about “calendar time,” which is what a duration is: it’s a measurement (or estimate) of how long the activity will take in real life, taking into account the number of people who will be doing the work, the availability of the people and other resources, everyone’s vacation time, time taken away from the schedule because people are pulled off of the activity to work on higher priority activities, and other real-world factors. That’s different from effort (which is often measured in person-hours), and it’s different from resource estimating (which involves estimating how many people and what other resources will be used for the activity).