HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)

Chapter 9

Scheduling the Work

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 in this sequence: (1) design the vehicle, (2) build ...