Project Schedule Planning

The bulk of the work in the planning phase revolves around the project scope, schedule, and budget. As you read through this chapter, pay special attention to how the work of the project is defined, how project resources are identified, how deliverables are decomposed into tasks that are logically sequenced, and how the work breakdown structure helps a project manager stay on top of the work of the project.

Leads and Lags

Sometimes you need to give some extra time between activities. Lag time is when you purposefully put a delay between the predecessor task and the successor. For example, when the bride and her father dance, the others wait awhile before they join them (Figure 10.6).

Figure 10.6: A lag means making sure that one task waits a while before it gets started.

Lead time is when you give a successor task some time to get started before the predecessor finishes (Figure 10.7). So you might want the caterer preparing dessert an hour before everybody is eating dinner.

Figure 10.7: A lead is when you let a task get started before its predecessor is done.