Project Management: Achieving Competitive Advantage, Fifth Edition

Controversies in the Use of Networks

1. LO 10.5 Understand the various types of common project costs and key differences between them.

The Program Evaluation and Review Technique/Critical Path Method (PERT/CPM) is a well understood and much employed system for project planning and scheduling. Nevertheless, networks are abstract representations of events in which time is reduced to a numerical value. They may or may not be drawn to a scale that has a relationship to the ongoing pattern of events. Sometimes this abstraction can be misleading. In fact, there are several criticisms and caveats we need to bear in mind as we develop project activity networks, including:5

1. Networks can become too large and complex to be meaningful. Many projects are large ...