Datasheet

Some tasks, called milestones, have no (0) duration. Milestones are merely points in time that mark

the start or completion of some phase of a project. For example, if your project involves designing

a new brochure, the approval of the initial design may be considered a milestone. You can assign a

duration to the process of routing the design to various people for review, but assigning a length of

time to the moment when you have everyone’s final approval is probably impossible. Therefore,

this task has a duration of 0 — that is, approval of the design is a milestone that simply marks a

key moment in the project.

Resource-driven schedules and fixed-duration tasks

Some tasks take the same amount of time — no matter how many people or other resources you

devote to them. Flying from San Francisco to New York is likely to take about five hours, regard-

less of how many pilots or flight attendants you add. You can’t speed up a test on a mixture of two

solvents that must sit for six hours to react by adding more solvent or by hiring more scientists to

work in the laboratory. These tasks have a

fixed duration, meaning that their timing is set by the

nature of the task.

On the other hand, the number of available resources can affect the duration of some tasks. For

example, if one person needs two hours to dig a ditch, adding a second person will likely cut the

time in half. The project still requires two hours of effort, but two resources can perform the task

simultaneously. Tasks whose durations are affected by the addition or subtraction of resources are

called

resource-driven tasks.

In real-world projects, this calculation is seldom so exact. Because people have different

skill levels and perform work at different speeds, two people don’t always cut the time

of a task exactly in half. In addition, the more people you add to a task, the more communication,

cooperation, and training may be involved. Microsoft Project handles additional assignments of

resources strictly as a mathematical calculation, but you can still use your judgment of the resources

that are involved to modify this calculation (see Chapter 10).

Diagrams that aid project management

Gantt Charts, network diagrams, and work breakdown structures (WBSs) are tools of project man-

agement that have evolved over many years. These tools are simply charts that you can use to track

different aspects of your project. Figure 1.3 shows a Microsoft Project Gantt Chart, and Figure 1.4

shows a Microsoft Project network diagram. Figure 1.5 shows a typical WBS, although Microsoft

Project does not include a WBS chart as one of its standard views.

NOTE

Project Management Basics

Part I

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