Software Project Management

Chapter Six

Activity planning
 Objectives of activity planning
This helps us to:
 Assessthe feasibility of the planned project
completion date
 Identify
when resources will need to be
deployed to activities
 Calculate when costs will be incurred
 This helps the co-ordination
 and motivation of the project team
Project schedules

4 steps
 Constructing an ideal activity plan
Risk analysis
Resource allocation
Schedule production
 Project activities
A project is:
Composed of a number of activities
May start when at least one of its
activities is ready to start
Completed when all its activities are
completed
 Defining activities -continued
 An activity
 Must have clearly defined start and end-points
 Musthave resource requirements that can be
forecast: these are assumed to be constant
throughout the project
 Must have a duration that can be forecast
 May
be dependent on other activities being
completed first (precedence networks)
 Identifying activities
 The activity based approach (dia next slide)
 Product-based approach
 list the deliverable and intermediate products of
project – product breakdown structure (PBS)
 Identify the order in which products have to be
created
 Work out the activities needed to create the
products
 Hybrid approach : final deliverable
ACTIVITY BASED
Sequencing and scheduling activities

A project plan as a bar chart

Network planning model
 Activity-on –node

 Activity-on-arrow
Formulating a network model
 A node has duration
 Links have no duration
 Precedents are the immediate preceding activities
 Time moves from left to right
 A network may not contain loops
 A network should not contain dangle
Lag:
Lag is the delay of a successor activity and represents time
that must pass before the second activity can begin.

 Representing lagged activities

Labelling conventions

Earliest activity Duration Earliest finish

Activity label . Activity description

Latest start Float Latest finish

Forward pass Earliest Duration Earliest

Example of an activity network activity finish

Activity label . Activity description

Latest Float Latest

start finish
 7 10

Earlier
diagram
Float =latest start – earliest start
 Activity float : it is the amount of time that a task in project can be
delayed without causing a delay in subsequent task
 It is difference between an activity’s earliest start date and its latest
start date .

 Note : any activity with a float of zero is critical in the sense that any
delay in carrying our the activity will delay the completion of the
project .
 Free float : how much an activity can be delayed without affecting its
successor activity

 Total float is how much an activity can be delayed without affecting the
project finish date

 Interfering float : difference between total float and free float

 Shortening the project duration
 More resources to task
 Critical path
 Increasing the amount of parallelism in the network
 Activity on arrow network