7 Habits of Highly Effective Microsoft Project Users - Put First Things First

Put First Things First

Now that we’ve built a solid Work Breakdown Structure, it’s time to ‘walk the talk’ and put first things first.  Building a complete and accurate dependency network is what makes the schedule truly proactive.  When building dependencies, try to think about natural relationships that exist for the scope of work and NOT on the order you would like to schedule things.  We typically talk about the cause and effect when adding predecessors and successors.  

Can we install the operating system before the server has been procured and received?  It’s a silly question, of course, but these relationships exist all throughout your schedule.  So, “Install Operating System on Test server for accounting system” is dependent on the milestone “Accounting Test Server hardware received”, which in turn is dependent on “Place order for Accounting Test Server hardware”, which happens to have 3 weeks of lead time.  Modeled properly, these relationships will help you automatically update the project schedule each week as the team makes progress.

The rules of dependency planning are pretty straightforward:

Every detailed task and milestone in the project schedule should be included in the dependency network, i.e. no ‘orphan’ detailed tasks or milestones.

That means a predecessor and successor on each, with the exception of starting points and the project completion milestone and potentially any Level Of Effort (LOE) tasks, such as ‘On-Going Project Management Support’.

Lead and lag time can be used to account for softer dependencies between tasks, e.g. starting testing when we’re 75% done with coding.

Summary tasks should NEVER have dependencies on them.

Putting first things first also means monitoring and focusing on the critical path of the project.  Showing the critical path in team meetings and status reports involves the team and clearly demonstrates the priorities that will allow us to ‘walk the talk’.  If we do experience a delay during project execution, we can easily search for effort-driven tasks on the critical path to take corrective action that can help bring us back on track.