(BQ) Part 2 book "Fundamentals of project management" has contents: Producing a workable schedule, project control and evaluation, the change control process, managing the project team, managing the project team, project control using earned value analysis,.and other contents. | CHAPTER 8 Producing a Workable Schedule O nce a suitable network has been drawn, with durations assigned to all activities, it is necessary to determine where the longest path is in the network and to see whether it will meet the target completion date. Since the longest path through the project determines minimum project duration, any activity on that path that takes longer than planned will cause the end date to slip accordingly, so that path is called the critical path. Schedule Computations Normally, you would let a computer do these computations for you, so you may wonder why it is necessary to know how to do them manually. My belief is that unless you know how the computations are done, you do not fully understand the meanings of float, early and late dates, and so on. Further, you can easily fall prey to the garbage-in, garbage-out malady. So here is a brief treatment of how the calculations are done by the computer. (For most schedules, the computer has the added bonus of converting times to calendar dates, which is no easy task to do manually.) 93 American Management Association • 94 Fundamentals of Project Management First, consider what we want to know about the project. If it starts at some time = zero, we want to know how soon it can be finished. Naturally, in most actual Failure to consider work projects, we have been told when we must be finished. That is, the end date resource allocation is dictated. Furthermore, the start date for in scheduling almost the job is often constrained for some reason: resources won’t be available, specs always leads to a won’t be written, or another project won’t be finished until that time. So schedule that canscheduling usually means trying to fit the not be achieved. work between two fixed points in time. Whatever the case, we still want to know how long the project will take to complete; if it won’t fit into the required time frame, then we will have to do something to shorten the critical path. In .
