Step 1 – Work Breakdown Project planning

4.3 Project planning 69 Figure 4.4 An example of a simple activity-on-the-node diagram progress. It is best to do this at the top level of the WBS and use some if not all of your project’s objectives as milestones. These milestones then identify areas of work that, when completed, indicate you have achieved a significant step along the way. The number of milestones that you will identify for your project will vary depending on the project’s size. For a year-long project, six or seven milestones should be more than adequate as these would represent, on average, the completion of approximately two months’ work. Milestones can also be associated with the production of various reports, documents or sub-systems – for example an interim deliverable or a project proposal, etc. One milestone you must always identify is the project’s completion. For simplicity only two milestones will be identified in the example project we are looking at; the completion of the literature survey milestone 1; M1 and the comple- tion of the project as a whole milestone 2; M2. M1 shows that a significant step has been made in establishing the project’s foundation. You would expect to achieve this milestone within the first 12 weeks. M2 is the end of the project and clearly represents a significant event in the work How these milestones are symbolised in the project plan is discussed in the following sections.

4.3.4 Step 4 – Activity sequencing

You now have an understanding of the work you need to perform in the project and the effort required to complete the individual tasks involved. An activity network can now be used to identify the order in which you should perform that work. Activity networks were first developed towards the end of the 1950s and are sometimes referred to as PERT networks, CPM or network diagrams. Two forms of activity network were developed at that time – Activity-on-the-arrow networks and activity-on-the-node networks. We will look at the simplest form of these diagrams in which activities are represented by rectan- gles or nodes – the activity-on-the-node network. Activity-on-the-node diagrams represent the tasks you are performing in your pro- ject as nodes connected by arrows. The arrows show the order in which activities must be performed. For example, in Figure 4.4, Task A can start at any time as it does not rely on any other task completing. Task A would therefore start at the beginning of the project. Task B cannot start until Task A has finished and Task D can only start after both tasks B and C have completed successfully. Task C is similar to Task B in that it cannot start until Task A has ended. If this representation is applied to the example stock market project introduced earlier it results in the activity-on-the-node representation shown in Figure 4.5. In this example the completion of the project’s report has been identified as an activity that is 70 Chapter 4 n Project planning and risk management Figur e 4.5 An e xample of an activity networ k