Engineering Project Management

7Creating Credible Predictions for Schedule and Cost: the Activity Network

In Chapters 2 and 3, I provided you with insight about some of the key factors regarding how we do engineering on projects. We will now use that knowledge as I start discussing the processes that we use for performing actual project management on our engineering project. In this chapter, I focus on the activity network, which allows us to make credible predictions regarding the schedule (that is, how long it will take us to do all of the work entailed in our project). We will also see how this same activity network is an essential first step toward estimating how much our project will cost. Predicting schedule and cost in a credible fashion are among the basic expectations for a good engineering project manager.

7.1 Setting the Stage

In this chapter, we will talk about how we go about creating credible predictions for two items: (i) how long it will take for our engineering project to complete all of the work entailed by the project's statement of work, specifications, and contract (we will call this the schedule); (ii) how much money it will take to complete all of the work entailed by the project's statement of work, specifications, and contract (we will call this the cost).

Notice that the information that people will want to know about schedule and cost are predictions about a future state. Yes, your boss and your customer will in fact want to know how much money you have actually spent thus far, ...