PMI CAPM – Plan and Control Project Time Management Part 2

3. Define the Project Activities

The whole point of project management is to get stuff done. And the way that things get done is that people have to take action. They have to execute the work and the project plan. So now we’re going to talk about defining those project activities, which are the actions that your team will take to create the elements within the work breakdown structure.

So if you recall back in Module 5, in the pinbox that we talked about, we had the scope statement, and in the scope we broke that down to the smallest item in the work breakdown structure, which was the work package. Good. So the work package then correlates to the activity list that we are about to create here. So now we’re looking at those work packages, and we’re saying, “What actions, what activities have to be completed in order to create this thing?” Now, if we think about this, if we’ve identified all of the activities and our team goes out and does the activities, which they will, that will create all of the work packages in the WBS.

The aggregate of all of those work packages will create all of the items in the work breakdown structure. If you’ve created all of the items in the WBS, you’ve then created the project scope, and in turn, you’ve created the product scope. And that leads us to project closure. When we think about it, it’s really kind of a beautiful thing—that we break it down and then do the work to rebuild it. All right, so let’s hop down to look at these project activities.

So to define the activities you’re defining, what are the actions? What are the activities associated with each work package? The smallest element in the work breakdown structure Activities will also be used for estimating costs, estimating our schedule, and then controlling the project work. So we have the activities. So that’s how we know how much things will cost—how much it will cost to do this work in terms of labor, materials, and so on.

How long will it take to do the work? putting those in the order that they should happen, and then ensuring that the work is done properly and controlling it throughout the project. We’re actually creating a new document here, the activity list. A lot of times when you open up Microsoft Project, for example, you’ll see this big table at the beginning, and that’s your activities list, where you begin to put the actions in and then you sequence them.

That’s the activity list. That’s what we’re talking about here. Now, again, on your exam, they aren’t going to use Microsoft Project, Basecamp, or Primavera. It’ll just be your PMIs. So it’s very generic. All of these have the same thing in common, though: we’re creating an activity list. So, making a list of all the things that we have to do to create the scope, what are the activity attributes? So, what materials, equipment, tools, facilities, and even travel will be assigned to these activities? could be an activity attribute; it could also be a risk. We could also include the responsible party who’s doing it in any notes about those activities that have to be considered the milestone list, recall it.The milestone list is made up of those key points that we’re working towards, usually at the end of a phase. So a milestone list shows us what activities lead to or contribute to which milestone. To define the activities, we need our schedule management plan, obviously, because that’s how we define activities based on that plan.

Our scope baseline Remember, that’s our scope statement, our work breakdown structure, and our WBS dictionary. And then we have EEF and OPA because you might have some rules and policies in your organisation that you have to adhere to. You might also have some forms, templates, or historical information that you can take and adapt to this project’s tools and techniques. We continue the idea of decomposition. Remember, the project scope is decomposed into the WBS, and we decompose that all the way down to the work package. Well, technically, here we’re taking the work package and decomposing it into the actual activity list, and an expert judgment, in particular, will be your project team members because they are closest to the work. I now skipped rolling wave planning. We do iterations of planning and doing in rolling-wave planning because it looks like a wave.

So you plan in detail for what’s most imminent, and you plan at a higher level for the entire project. So you plan and execute outputs. Here is the activity list. So that’s the whole goal of defining activities. You have the activity attributes that we talked about a moment ago, and then your milestone list becomes a little bit more firm as to what actions lead up to the milestones. Have we identified any new milestones because of these activities? Defining the project activities: well, we are going to define the activities based on the project work. So those are the things that we have to do to create the scope. But we also have project management work. And this is important because not only are there activities to create the project scope, but there may be project management activities.

My project manager does things like create particular documents, create status reports every week, host meetings, do quality control, and so on. So I can also schedule the activities that I have to do as the project manager. Things like planning processes are included here as well. that we have to plan for scope, we have to plan for schedule, and we have to plan for quality in every one of our knowledge areas. Remember that planning is iterative. So as needed, we go back and plan in more detail based on what’s happening in our projects. We have to be able to control, but we also have to be able to react to situations that may be happening in the project. Defining the project activities will help us begin to sequence the events. So it’s a little hint at what’s coming up. We have to consider things like procurement time. If I need some cabinets at the job site in 30 days and it takes 21 days to do procurement, I have to plan 21 days ahead of when the cabinets are actually delivered. So, that idea of some lead time that I’m planning ahead for when I actually need them, I back that up by 21 days or more to ensure that the cabinets are at the site when I need them.

So we’ll talk a little bit about lead time coming up, but we also have to consider procurement time. There may also be some internal and external events that affect what we have to account for. Think about the different seasons of a business. So in an accounting firm, in the month of April, a lot of people are doing taxes. probably not really willing to take on a big project in those early months of the year. Or if you’re in retail, you know that around the holidays or Christmas time, there are some really busy shopping days. So you probably don’t need to upgrade that equipment at those times. Internal and external events are any events that could cause a disruption in your business or organization. Finally, the definition of the activities exposes us to some risk because we have known and unknown events.

When it comes to defining the activities, known events could be things like safety measures that take time to do or maintenance on equipment that will take time to do. So it causes our activities to pause in our schedule to take those safety measures or to do maintenance on pieces of equipment. Unknown events are things that we know are probably going to happen, but we just can’t really nail down when they’re going to happen.

I know that sounds pretty vague, right? What about the weather? So, if you’re working on a construction project, there’s a chance that the weather will cause it to be halted or that someone will be injured. And so if someone gets hurt at a job site, we have to shut down the site, and OSHA will inspect. And it’s a longer process, so it could cause a delay in the work that we do. So unknown events could interrupt our schedule. We just don’t know when or if they’re really going to happen. Decompose the project activities. I think you probably already have this idea because it’s the same concept that we looked at in the work breakdown structure. We bring our to-do list. It’s based on those work packages. There’s a relationship between the work package and the activities.

There’s a general rule called the 880 rule. And this is something that I get a lot when we’re talking about the work breakdown structure. And maybe you had this question too, the idea being in the WBS: if I’m decomposing and decomposing and decomposing, at what point do I stop the decomposition? So if I have that house, I could breakdown the different floors and rooms into the kitchen, the different appliances, and the cabinets, and I could break down the cabinets into the drawers.

And inside the drawers, there’s a screw that holds the wheel in place, so the drawer glides in and out. Do I need to break it down that far to the individual screws in the cabinets? Well, that would be just really silly and counterproductive, right? So what we do is we follow this general heuristic, which is just a guideline of the 880 rule, which states that we don’t want to break things down in our work breakdown structure smaller than 8 hours of labor.

So an activity, and if it lasts more than 80 hours, it’s probably too long. We need to break it down some more. So 880 is basically all of your activities, which should take no longer than 80 hours and no less than 8 hours. Again, that’s just a guideline. It’s a heuristic. There may be some activities that you want to make certain are scheduled, and so they only take maybe 4 hours or 3 hours to do, but you want to make certain they’re scheduled. So you go around this little guideline. This is a standard way to decompose the project activities. We need three inputs. Remember that we require our scope baseline. That’s our scope statement. The work breakdown structure in the WBS dictionary enterprise environmental factors Because how you schedule people is directly controlled or directly influenced by your enterprise’s environmental factors, Your employees at your company may not be able to work more than 40 hours a week, so you can’t do any overtime or work on your project.

They’re only allowed to work 20 hours a week if you’re in a matrix environment or dealing with unions, and they have certain rules and guidelines that you have to adhere to. As a result, enterprise environmental factors must be considered when scheduling labour on your project. And then we have OPA, and these are things to help you decompose the project activities and begin thinking about units of measure and how long things should last. What did you do in previous projects that you can apply to this one? So all those things that are created for you from historical information are organizational process assets. Our goal here is to create an activity list. This is a separate document. It’s not part of the WBS. It’s a separate document, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a big list of all the project activities. Now, with each activity, just like we did in the WBS, we could have an activity identifier like 4315-8 or whatever the case may be.

We can carry that out. You don’t have to, but you sure could. And then, with each activity, we might have a scope of work description. So if the activity is to instal the front door to the house, there might be a little verbiage there about, well, what’s the door model, who’s creating the door, who’s the locksmith? and things like that. So, you don’t have to do it on every activity, but you could, or at least on the most important activities in your project. One of the tools and techniques we saw earlier in the course, the one I skipped over in those edos, was rolling wave planning.

So here we’re going to talk about it in more detail. Rolling-wave planning is this idea you can see across the bottom where I have waves of planning and then I execute and plan and execute. So I plan and plan and plan. So rolling away planning is a great way to plan in detail for what’s happening next in my project. And I have a very high level of planning for the entire project.

Because my milestone list encompasses the entire project, I don’t need to specify when or what activities will take place for events that will take place ten months from now. I have a general idea. At the end of the project, we instal the cabinets and do the carpentry and finishing work. But I don’t need to know who’s going to instal that cabinet or what actions we’re going to take in month eleven of this twelve-year project on day one. I have a general idea, but I don’t need to be extremely specific right now on Day 1.

So I can do iterations of planning and doing. Over here on the right, we have this idea of milestones and phase gates. This nice S-curve that you see here represents our project timeline. So we’re going from the beginning to the end, and that dot at the very end represents the completion of the project. Each one of those dots represents a milestone. So rolling wave planning could happen for the whole project, but we could also do it within each phase. like each phase represents planning and executing and planning and executing and so on. So what this would look like is that we would plan for this first phase of the project. So, from the first dot to the second dot, we pause execution and return to planning to begin planning for the next phase of the project, the second phase to reach the third milestone, and so on. Then, when we get to the third milestone, we would pause, and then that would allow us to plan to reach the fourth milestone and again all the way to the end of the project.

So phase-gate planning means that a phase ends and a gate happens. So you plan, and then you move through that gate to do the work. Pay attention to that little step that happens between the different milestones. We’re going to see that again when we get into cost, because not only can we do this for time, we can also do this for cost estimating. So you’re ahead of the game when it comes to estimating costs. Templates, organisational process assets—anything that’s been created for you can be a template. So historical information, prepopulated forms, and OPA are all templates. So we’ve seen that over and over, and we’ll continue to see that over and over. Some planning components talked about control accounts. Remember that I can have a control account or cap where I know that in the kitchen I’m going to have cabinets, light fixtures, and appliances. Well, I don’t need to know everything about that on day one.

So I could say in the kitchen we have a budget of $75,000, and so it’s going to have kitchen stuff in it. It’s going to take about three weeks to complete that kitchen. So scope, cost, and schedule could all be in that controlled account plan. Remember that individual items like what type of cabinets or what type of appliances are part of a planning package? So when we are planning packages, we have a decision to make at some point in the future if we don’t make that decision by a given deadline, like knowing what type of cabinets you want by November 1.

If we miss that, that’s a risk, and that risk has now become an issue. So the issue we have to deal with is going to throw our schedule off. We’re probably going to be late. Each activity can have some activity attributes, such as the name and description, as well as an ID, a WBS Identifier, which links back to those work packages. What’s the relationship between activities? So cabinets, countertops, and appliances all have a relationship. I talked a little bit about leads and lags.

Lead time means hurry up; lag time means separate things. We’ll see that again coming up, don’t worry. And then finally, activity attributes, resource requirements—what resources do I need? People, materials, equipment, and facilities are all resources that we have to consider when it comes to activity attributes. Do you have any imposed dates that you have to meet by October 30 with this phase of the project? because that’s when the inspector is available to come out to the job site. So that would be a deadline we have to work against.

Or you have a trade show and can’t move the trade show, so you better be done with the work in order to have it ready for the trade show. So it’s an imposed date. constraints and assumptions. Remember, a constraint is anything that limits your options. You have to use a particular type of material. This activity has to be done before another, so activities have to happen in a particular order or according to certain assumptions. You’re assuming that these two activities could happen at the same time. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. If they cannot, we have a bad assumption that creates an issue.

And then any additional information you want to attach to these activities—notes about them, things to consider, people to call before you do them, things like that. All right, good job. I know this was a long lecture. We covered a lot of material here. We talked about activities and defining activities. In the next lecture, we’re going to look at putting these activities in the order in which they should happen. So I’ll see you there.

4. Sequence the Project Activities

In this lecture, we’re going to talk about the sequencing of the project activities. Now that we’ve created the scope, the work breakdown structure, and the activity list, we have to put those activities in the order in which they should happen. So there are a lot of things that we have to consider when it comes to sequencing project activities. There are a few different approaches you can take here to sequence activities, computer-driven being probably the most common. We got a Microsoft project, we identified our activities, and we linked those together to create a project network diagram. That’s a computer-driven approach. We could do a manual approach where we’re drawing this out on a whiteboard, maybe using some sticky notes to populate and create a P&D or a blended approach.

This is actually the approach that I like. I want to use those sticky notes on a whiteboard. For me, it’s easier to move stuff around and for everyone to see the activity sequence, and then we’ll take a picture of it and recreate that. Sequencing activities in Microsoft Project or Primavera is all about identifying a predecessor and a successor for each event. So predecessors are things that come before this event, and successors are things that come after this event. One activity can be both a predecessor and a successor. Sequencing activities also helps us to really work against or lead up to our milestone list. So one approach is to have our milestones identified, and then what are the activities we need to do to get to this milestone? We saw that a little bit in the last lecture, where we talked about rolling wave planning and phase gate planning. So let’s look at the eDo for activity sequencing. A lot of inputs here.

The schedule management plan, the activity list that we’ve just created, the activity attributes that we’ve created, that milestone list that we’re working against, the project scope statement, enterprise, environmental factors, any rules or policies, and OPA templates and forms that can help you complete this process Now, some tools and techniques are here.

The most common one is a precedence diagramming method. All that means is that you have predecessors and successors. So, what comes before this activity in terms of precedence? So the precedence diagramming method, also known as PVM, is an acronym you don’t need to remember for your exam. They’ll spell out the precedence diagramming method. Dependency determination: dependencies are things that are dependent on this activity’s finishing. So these activities can’t start until this predecessor finishes, so they are dependent on this guy finishing. And then we’ll look at leads and lags. We had already seen some of it.

We’re going to look at it in just one moment. There are now outputs of the activity sequencing here. I receive my project network diagram. That’s the visualisation of the flow of the project’s work. And I might have updates to my project documents because you might identify some new activities that have to go back into the activity list. Or some project manager activities that need to be updated so that your project documents can be updated using the precedence diagramming method. Above and beyond all of these, we have four types of relationships that you should be familiar with for your exam. The most common is simply “finish to start,” where an activity must be finished so that the next activity can start. I must finish painting the walls so I can start installing the carpet.

A finishes so that B can start. The next one here is that activity A must start so that activity B can start, so these two can happen in tandem. So here’s an example of a start to finish. We’re going to pull network cable, which has to start so the electrician can begin installing the patch panel in our serverroom, so one starts so the other can start.

The opposite of that is finishing to finish. As a result, activity A must be completed before activity B can be completed. That example of pulling network cable to the serverroom while the electrician is installing the patch panel You could also have a finish-to-finish relationship. You have to finish pulling all of the network cable to the server room so the electrician can finish the patch panel and punch down all of those cables. So one has to finish so the other can finish. They can start to start and finish to finish, which generally means these activities are happening at the same time. It’s just, are they starting or finishing? What’s the goal here? The last one is the most unusual. I doubt you saw it on your exam.

It’s generally reserved for scheduling engineers. If you were to take the PMI scheduling professional exam, you would get a lot of questions about this particular activity relationship, but you probably won’t have any on your PMP. Nevertheless, let’s talk about it. It is a start-to-finish to finish.It’s the most unusual relationship type.

Activity A must start so that activity B can finish. What this means is that activity A has to start doing its work, which allows the follow-on activity to finish as a result of activity A starting. Now, it sounds really weird. Here’s an example: We are in manufacturing. We’re going to go back, remember this, and manufacture these plastic bottles. Well, we only have so much space on our shop floor for these plastic materials. In fact, we only keep enough plastic to create 100,000 bottles at a time because we don’t have any more space. Well, we have a job to create a project here.

We’re going to make 500,000 of these bottles so that activity eight can begin, but we’ll only be able to do 100,000 at a time because we don’t have any more materials. We don’t have the room for that much material. Well, the start of manufacturing the bottles will then allow activity B to finish, which is the replenishment of that material on the floor.

So as I consume the plastics, I’m ordering and doing procurement, allowing 100,000 more pounds of material to be placed on the shop floor so I can continue the flow. So sometimes you’ll see this with just-in-time inventory and just-in-time scheduling, so it’s start to finish. If you didn’t get it or don’t want to get it, don’t worry about it. I really, really doubt you’ll see this on your exam. It’s the most unusual. The ones to pay attention to Finishing, starting, starting, and finishing, finishing. Those will most likely appear on your exam. Dependency Determination There are some terms here that you need to be aware of for your exam, and I think these are logical.

The first is hard logic, which is a mandatory dependency. The work just has to happen in this order. So construction is a great example of that. The foundation must be finished before you can begin framing the house. The software has to be installed before you can begin using the new printer, or whatever the case may be. So it’s hard logic; it has to be done in this order. You can’t mix and match. There’s no way around it. ABC always happens in that order. Now, a discretionary dependency is also called “soft logic,” because it’s at your discretion that you can change the ordering of events with discretionary dependencies. So an example would be that we paint the walls and then instal the carpet. I don’t necessarily have to do it in that order.

In fact, some construction places or contractors are paint-last, so they could put the floor in and everything else and then paint, so you don’t have to do it in a particular order. It’s soft logic, so it’s discretionary. Then we have external dependencies. Where you have an external constraint, your project is moving forward. You’ve reached a significant milestone. You can’t move forward until the inspector from the city comes to your job site, inspects the work, and signs the permit to allow you to move forward.

That’s an external constraint. If it’s a very busy construction site in that city or they don’t have enough inspectors, you might be waiting and waiting and waiting for the inspector to sign off. Another external constraint could be that your project is dependent on another project, and you can’t move forward until their project is done. I’ll give you an example. I’m experiencing this very thing right now. I have a little condo that we bought as an investment, and there’s a problem with the roof. Well, we’re painting and doing all sorts of work in this condo, but we’re stuck in one room until they fix the problem with this roof.

And we’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting. So if my condo association is watching this, let’s pick that up a little bit. So we have an external constraint, though everything else is done except for the condo association fixing the roof in this one room, so that’s an external constraint. I know you didn’t need to hear my problem, but it’s a good example of an external constraint. Now, internal dependencies are a type of hard logic. So you have a project team member in a matrix environment, and there are other projects already scheduled. Your project has to accommodate their schedule already within the company, so they can’t come work on it until they’re finished with these activities over here.

So it’s a type of hard logic that’s internal to your organisation and could also be internal to your project. Bob cannot work on two tasks at the same time, even if both tasks could be started or completed from scratch. Bob’s the only resource you have that can do both. So you have an internal dependency as a type of hard logic. The next terms that we need to look at are leads and lags. Lead time is really accelerated time; it brings activities closer together, and they really overlap. So, given enough time, they come together.

So as an example of lead time, we are going to remodel this huge banquet hall, and ordinarily we would prime all the walls and then we would paint all the walls. Well, because it’s such a big facility, we can actually have the crew that is going to do the priming on these walls. Once they get about 8 hours ahead, then our second crew can come in and begin painting.

So while ordinarily this would be a finish to start (which it still is), what we’re doing is doing a negative 8 hours on the start of activity B to bring those activities closer together and even overlap, so that’s lead time. Negative time is lead time. Lag time is waiting time. Lag time moves activities further apart. So let’s go back to our painting scenario. So we have to prime the walls and then paint the walls. I live down in Florida, and here in Florida, as you may know, it gets pretty sticky in the summertime, really humid, and hardwood floors will swell up. Doors don’t close as easily because of all the humidity; it’s just wet. Well, if we’re painting in the summertime and we have to prime the walls, the primer takes longer to cure because of the humidity in the air. So, instead of 8 hours in a drier climate, it could take 24 hours down here in the south where it’s more humid. So that’s a lag time, and I can’t start painting until the primer is cured.

So I have to wait longer in order to do that next activity. So some leaders and laggards know the difference between the two. When you lead, you hurry up; when you lag, you wait. Network Templates This is one of our OPAs. If I have a similar project, I’m going to adapt it to my current project. If your company does the same types of projects over and over again, you might just have a pre-populated template with these particular activities already defined and already put in the order they should happen. And then all that you do is add the resources to the activities.

That’s perfect. That’s the template. This comes from OPA. It’s an organizational process for asset sequencing output. So we’ve put this stuff in order. I want to know what my required work is and ensure that it is scheduled to be completed before beginning, which is the most common scenario. Now, activity sequencing is not on the schedule. Activity sequencing is just the order of events. A perk chart is not necessarily the same thing as a project network diagram. A perk chart does show the sequencing, but a project network diagram is where we also get in and where we think about float and an early start. Early finishing shows the critical path for some of that business.

So just to be clear, in project network diagrams, what we’re going to be talking about coming up is really about finding the critical path and float. So that’s a preview of what’s to come in the course. When the project scope changes, it is possible that you will need to update your project network diagram. For example, you’re going to have to add activities to your activity list, which means you’ll have to update the project network diagram.

So that’s something to always consider when changes come to a project. What does it do to my schedule? What does it do to my project’s network diagram? Your project network diagram can really be updated for a number of reasons. We haven’t talked about risk yet, but risk could also affect our schedule and cause the P and D to change the idea of quality, which could affect our network diagram. things like that. Any type of issue that has a ripple effect over time may cause us to update our project network diagram.

All right, a lot of information Good job reaching the end of the slide. I just want to tell you that you are really moving through the course. You’re making good progress. This is some meaty stuff that we’re getting into. Stay motivated. Stay on your plan that you created way back at the beginning of the course. Don’t give up. You can do this. I have confidence that you can do this. All right, keep moving forward, and I’ll see you in the next lecture.