Today is the first installment for external article. Today’s PMP® Exam Tip is the courtesy of PM Podcast. Visit their website for more information on PMP® Exam preparation.
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The terms leads and lags are used to identify and control the timing of various activities within the project. It is important to accurately document leads and lags.
Lead Time: Let's assume a project has two pieces that need to be completed at the same time. Work package A will take 4 weeks to complete, but work package B only takes one week. B would show in the project plan as a finish to start (FS) with a one week lead. This means the B work package component should start one week before A is scheduled to be completed.
Lag Time: Lag time can best be described as a planned or forced delay. A great example of this is a construction project that involves pouring concrete. The project plan must include a lag time of 2 days for the concrete to dry before the next phase can begin.
Hammock Activity: Hammock activity is also frequently referred to as summary activity. These are activities that are roughly related and are reported as a single activity. Some times the relationship between the activities is clear, other times they may only be related because their completion leads to the same result. On a Gantt chart a hammock activity is usually displayed as a thick black bar above a grouping of lower level activities.
Crashing and fast tracking are techniques used in schedule compression. Schedule compression is used when the desired result is to create output faster than indicated in the original project, without having to change the project scope. This is particularly beneficial if a competitor is working on the same type of project and you need to finish first. It may also be a company decision to complete a project more quickly than originally scheduled based on various factors.
The two techniques used for this process are referred to as crashing or fast tracking.
Crashing: When the crashing approach is used, any additional costs associated with rushing the project are reviewed against the possible benefits of completing the project on a faster timeline. Additional items to consider when using the crashing approach include adding more resources for the project, allowing additional overtime, paying extra to receive delivery of critical components more quickly, etc. Crashing only works, when adding more resources will lead to a faster completion of a project. For instance crashing will not work by adding more resources to "the concrete in the foundation has to dry for 3 days".
Fast Tracking: Fast tracking is applied by re-scheduling various activities within the project to be worked on simultaneously instead of waiting for each piece to be completed separately. This method is best used when activities can be overlapped. The risk involved is that problems can occur if parallel aspects of the project include dependencies. So if you work on design and production at the same time your risk is that you need to rework production if the design is change half way through the process.
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