Project Management Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

Chapter 5

You Want This Project Done When?

In This Chapter

Coming up with a list of activities

Creating an Activity Network for your project

Discovering how long the project will take

Using the Gantt Chart

Project assignments often have deadlines, but even if you haven’t been given one, you’ll want to know when the job will be finished. For one thing, you have other work to move on to, but then other people may need to know when your project will deliver in order to fit in with what you’re delivering or changing.

If you are given a required end date and it fills you with panic, don’t worry. One major reason to do the planning is to ensure that you can meet the end date with time to spare.

In Chapter 4 the planning started with products: What it is you’re going to build and deliver. But products don’t have durations — a wooden table doesn’t have a time span; rather, it’s the activities to build the table that have the time span. To calculate the length of the project and to know what work is to be done, activity planning isn’t only helpful, it’s essential.

In this chapter you find ...