PMP® Study Notes

Project Schedule Management


Phase Gate – decision to continue or not to next phase

Task dependency

Start-to-Finish (SF)

Start-to-Start (SS)

Finish-to-Start (FS)

Finish-to-Finish (FF)


Sequential relationships - finish to start

Overlapping relationships - start to start

Activity Dependency

1. Mandatory – must finish to start

2. Discretionary – Best practice

3. External – supplier, government department

4. Internal – internal approval process


Float (also called slack) – the amount of time a given task can be delayed without causing a delay in the entire project.

Calculate Float - Find the second-longest sequence of activities in the network diagram. Subtract its total duration from the duration of the critical path sequence. The difference between the two durations will give you the float for each activity in the second sequence.

Total float - Subtract the task's earliest finish (EF) date from its latest finish (LF) date.

Free float - Calculated by subtracting the task’s earliest finish date from its earliest start date.

Lead - time is the amount of time it should take to complete a task without impacting the following activities.

Lag - time refers to the earliest point at which a task can follow another

Resources Optimization

1. Leveling - Resource Leveling is applied to a schedule before it has been analysed by the critical path method.

2. Smoothing


Schedule Compression

Fast tracking vs Crashing - Fast-tracking involves completing activities simultaneously while crashing consists of adding resources to a project to complete it faster. Fast-tracking accrues more risk while crashing increases the project cost.


Control schedule - A project that is halfway through its execution. Adjusts a few of the schedule milestones and imposes date constraints for some of the work packages.

Path Convergence - a relationship in which a schedule activity has more than on predecessor.

Path Divergence - a relationship in which a schedule activity has ore than one successor.

A Hub Activity - an activity or milestone that is a successor and/or predecessor to many activities.


返回