HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS
Scheduling the Work: Put the Horse Before the Cart
Now that you’ve used the Work Breakdown Structure to identify and define your project’s tasks and estimate how long each will take, you’re ready to put them in sequence. That involves three steps:
- Examining relationships between tasks
- Creating a draft schedule
- Optimizing the schedule
Examining Relationships Between Tasks
Task relationships dictate the order of activities in a project. Suppose ABC Auto Company plans to introduce a new passenger car and has asked a team to design and test it. The team needs to build and test both external and internal components before it can test the whole car. Because of those dependencies, the project’s tasks must be scheduled ...
Get HBR Guide to Project Management now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
