Guild of Project Controls: Compendium | Roles | Assessment | Certifications | Membership

Revision of Network Rules from Sat, 2009-06-27 08:40

When building your activity network, the following items are concidered Best Practice...

PLEASE ADD TO, OR AMEND THIS LIST...

  1. All tasks / activities have predecessor and successor
  2. All tasks / activities have at least one Finish-to-Start successor
  3. Resources are assigned to tasks / activities and not summary activities
  4. Milestones do not have resources / budget (a milestone does not have scope)
  5. Thou shall not have negative lag on a task / activity.  Most people are pretty soft on that, but general opinion is that negative lag predicts the future with certainty and that is poor logic
  6. GoldyLocks was right - tasks are not too long or too short, they have to be "just right" in duration. You have to decide what that means and set sensible / justifiable durations. ( Quantiies & Norms will help you achieve the correct duration and the addition of available personnel to complete the task will help finalise the duration)
  7. Too much positive lag on a task probably indicates missing tasks
  8. Constraint types: You want them to be As Soon As Possible as much as you can. Start-No-Earlier-Than, Finish-As-Late-As-Possible, and Finish-No-Earlier-Than are tolerable. Items like Must-Finish-On, Must-Start-On, Finish-No-Later-Than, Start-No-Later-Than are pretty much not a good thing.
  9. Constraints in the programme should not limit, or affect, the CPM analysis of the network
  10. Check your logic
  11. Every activity gets a baseline

Market Place

Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project books, on-line video training courses and training material available from an internationally recognised publisher. Teach yourself using on-line or book based learning or run your own in-house or public courses.