Hello Everyone, Welcome. In this post we are going to talk about Work breakdown structure, Duration, Dependency, and Network Diagram. In the Work breakdown structure (WPS) we would mention Tasks, Sub Tasks and all the details. Within work breakdown structure, we must add the dependency and the duration for the main and subtask upon. Everything must be clearly stated and in a proper order. For example, without proper requirement analysis we can never design or even develop the project accordingly. Likewise, if you take the documentation of a new software without designing and developing the said software we cannot go and create its documentation. For a clear scheduling we must clearly prepare and mention the things that are to do in relative manner. A Network Diagrams purpose is to find the critical path. Meaning, how soon and how late a project could be finished, what order it should be done and the separate time frame that could be allocated for it. So, why do you think these durations are important? Every Clients states a strict requirement date for projects. Incase if it is delayed all the activities that are to follow up upon its release will get delayed too. Depending on the project some clients may lose considerable sum of money over it. because of that client decides whether to hand over a project or not mostly based on duration. There could be other facts behind his / her decision at times but most of the scenarios works like this. So, for us to minimize the total duration we must do some of the given tasks parallelly which must be followed in a way that it will not be delayed ever. To find these we use Network Diagram. Once the scheduling done, we arrange the necessary tasking activity that take place in a project within the Network diagram using Precedence diagramming method. All the sub task and the main tasks which does not have subtasks of them included in this network diagram. This network diagram’s goal is to find the critical paths to finish the project as early as possible by doing the task parallelly wherever possible. Let us investigate the network diagram. Here mentioned details are Early Start Time (EST), Early Finish Time (EFT), Latest Start Time (LST), Latest Finish Time (LFT), Float , Duration , and the middle one mentioned here is the task number. To fill in the network diagram use below rules Early Finish Time = Early Start Time + Duration (Using Forward Allocation) Latest Start Time = Latest Finish Time – Duration (Using Backwards Allocation) Float = Latest Finish Time – Early Start Time – Duration Moving forward when two tasks connected to one task larger value of those Early Finish Time will be taken forward as Early Start Time. For example, moving forward these three tasks numbered as 6.1, 5.3 and 5.4 are connected to 6.2. Early Finish Time of those three are 9, 13 and 14. The largest value 14 will be taken in task number 6.2 as Early Start time. Likewise, when on backwards if two or more tasks connected to one task smallest value of those latest start time will be taken backwards for latest finish time. For Example, if the task number 5.1, 6.1 and 5.2 connected to 4.2 backwards within these latest start time 9, 13 and 8 the smallest value of 8 will be taken and updated as latest finish time for 4.2. Network diagram is a visual representation of what needs to be done. In this whichever the path that takes the maximum duration which is equal to the entire duration of the project is known as the critical path. The activities we have in critical path are known as critical activity. Because Critical path take maximum duration to complete the project in that path, critical activity float will be zero. Here Float mean how much time you can delay a task without impact your critical path. For the activities that are not in critical path here, float values of them will be more than zero. That implies these activities could be delayed as much as the float value without impacting the final project. Hope I managed to explain the details of Network Diagram and its related activities as much clear as possible. If there are any mistakes, please do share it in comments so the others could know about correct methods. Once again if anyone wants me to cover any part of Tech and Software related content, please drop it in comments. If I am familiar of the said subject, I will be sure to share a video on that. Thank you for Watching/ Reading till the end.
