Enjoy this video of my free online PMP Exam Preparation training course and prepare to sit and pass the PMP certification exam from PMI. This PMP training video covers the Schedule Management Knowledge Area in PMBOK6 and specifically the Sequence Activities process.
Once you define the activity is the next logical thing that you will do is you sequence them which you’ve seen me do you know I added dates typically the dates you leave them to later put the sequencing like which one should happen first which one should happen next and you can talk to the specialists themselves who are doing the work and ask them which one happens first which one happens next I don’t need to be a specialist and you know I know you have fears of I’m not a specialist I don’t know and they could just lie to me and they could just give me durations that don’t make sense or tell me that this really has to wait for that I’m true they can do that but in reality if you are working with contractors they could deceive you for the financial gain I get that but for expertise purposes most of the time contractors want to show off that they’re experts they’re not going to give you a sense that we’re not experts employees on the other hand I’m not obligated so they will push you off they’ll be like I’m busy I can’t you know I don’t have time and you know you’ll figure it out but contractors tip if you want to show off the expertise so I wouldn’t really add that much of a fear that they would not give me a good information there I would have fear of them dragging the work for durations so for now for sequencing activities I’m not as worried they would tell me that something needs to happen first and something else happens later but you could you’re always free to ask why explain to me so you can use whatever style you like but they can explain to you why something happens first and why it’s the other is dependent on it now the importance of this is that if I put everything back to back on a schedule that projects going to take a very long time so look at these activities that I have here on the screen if everything is going to be back to back that means this will never happen that you see on the right I don’t know if you can see my mouse as I move it but you know here if everything has to happen back-to-back then this relationship has to go it means I will never have anything that happens without it being back-to-back so everything will have to hey so everything is going to look like this I’m going to remove this it’s going to look like that and I’m going to remove this mind you just because they stacked up on top of each other it doesn’t mean they have to happen in that specific order they could just jump from here you know you could jump from here to here and then from here to here and so on okay so you can jump as needed depending on the relationship between these specific activities so the people involved would have to tell you which ones they are dependent on and then you will make the connections and you’ll end up with a schedule but you will notice that just look at these that I’m I don’t know if you can see the mouse but the ones on the right hand side that I’m clicking those are back-to-back but if I change their relationship by clicking on it see the stairs finish to start but if I went and changed it to start to start meaning once the first one starts the second one can start and I hit okay notice what happened to them they overlap that means when this first one starts the other one can now start they will not start if the first one doesn’t start so let’s say I pushed the start date for the first one out you see the other one also moves with it it cannot start until the first one starts it has a dependency on the first one to start but the fact that it can do start to start allows it to run almost at the same time which is different than when you have it as finished to start because now and finish the start it would have to wait and that will take longer for the project to complete so these dependencies need to be figured out so that you can properly develop your schedule all right and for you to figure these out you have to sit with the people involved and ask them to tell you what is the dependency between them and the is what we’re looking at and tools and techniques down here the dependency determination and integration you’re going to integrate from a contractor from another team I can take from different teams and I will connect the activities together and there’s a few terms you’re going to be learning today all right so the terms that you want to learn are the following we are going to learn PDM press precedence diagramming method the precedence diagramming method is what you see down here this is a process of diagramming where each connection the arrow there depends on something that precedes it so this is the precedence diagramming so something precedes the other and so it’s called precedence argument or if you want to learn the word its PDM that will show up on the exam it is also called the activity on node because the activity a is on the node that you see here which is the box that’s what they mean a long time ago they had something called activity on arrow where the box was the connection and the arrow was the activity and the longer it was the longer the duration but now we use the arrow for connection so basically every one of these boxes that you see is an activity and likewise on my schedule every one of these that you saw every one of these bars that you saw here the ones on you know showing you here these are all activities but when we’re first starting notice what they look like they’re all look the same and all we had to do was sequence them and determine which one happens first or next and I wouldn’t really have something dragging out like this while I’m trying to connect them I can have them stacked up like this one here and just do the connections between them and then figure out how long they take that’s how PMI is suggesting that we do it first figure out the connections between them then figure out how long each is going to take so we will be learning the PDM precedence diagramming method which is what you see down here on this screen and this one depends on four types of relationship the first one here is the common one which is finished to start where it means that one activity has to finish before the other one starts so you see here this is the finished part and this is the start part of the other activity so it’s saying activity a has to finish before activity B can start so if the activity a was four days and activity B was five days you will need nine days to complete them now sometimes we don’t have that kind of dependency now most activities will be like that but you could have situations where something can start and the other one can also start not at the same time exactly but it’s waiting for it to start so it can’t start and I’ll give you an example imagine if I was painting the new offices that we’re moving into and let’s say I want it and it’s a big office several floors and we want to paint two coats of paint okay we want to paint it once and then twice and let’s say it takes three days for each time well let’s make it simple five days round numbers it takes five days to think that the first time the whole office and corners and everything and ceiling and then we want to paint it one more time so it will take another five days so if we use the finish to start then we will need 10 days so what I’m going to do now is I’m just going to show you these directly let’s say let’s say the first one here in construction I’m just gonna say paint first coat I’m just damaging this schedule okay and the second one is paint second coat okay so for paint first coat I need five days for the second one I need five days and let’s say this was the whole project so what I’m going to do is I’m going to delete all of these this is my whole project how long would the project take it tells you right there it takes 10 days you see it think you do alright so it takes ten days this is because we’re doing finish to start what if I decided that you know what I’m going to paint the first coat in five days but the second coat really doesn’t need for the for the whole first coat to finish but instead let them start one day later so that the paint will already be dry in some place where you started so you start in one place one corner by next day you would have finished a major space and you go to the next block of pink that you need to do then the other group goes to where you started yesterday and it will be dry by then they will start their second coat so I’m going to same once you start I will start one day later the other the second group was not one day later so I’m going to change this relationship to start to start with a one day lag so that’s what it’s called one day later I will start after you start if you don’t start the first coat one day later I cannot start because I will be the first coat in that case so this is you start one day later I will start and you will see that the schedule will finish in six days okay because now we overlap them with a difference of one day you will finish before me one day later I would finish okay so this is the start to start example and notice the arrow how it looks here it comes out from the left all right you see if coming here over here on the left here you see it’s coming out from one activity and it’s going into another activity because the left side of the bar is the start and the right side here of the bar is the finish part of it okay so this is how we use stock to start there’s also there’s also finish to finish so finish to finish is another one so we did start to start okay that’s the one that we did right here so finish to finish is almost the same as start to start except this on the other side and finish to finish you’re saying activity being down here can only finish when activity a is finished and you’re waiting for the other person to finish I’m going to change the relationship that you see here in this open proj and I’m going to change it to finish to finish okay and let’s see it needs one extra day to finalize this report then this is what it looks like so this will be I don’t know work report yeah and this will be paint all the walls yeah whatever you can imagine it right so you see it will still finish in six days because he can start anytime you can see it right there that he is able to start he’s able to start anytime I’m able to start any time but he has an arrow coming from my side to his side that suggests that if that his ability to do that arrow there is dependent on my ability to exit out there so I have to finish before he can finish but this is the finish to finish relationship alright and then there’s one more type of relationship which we hardly ever used this is the one in green in the bottom corner it is start to finish not really used in project management much but I can imagine in operations we could use that so for example like right now with the hospitals with Corona you know nurses will take shifts and the second shift it the first shift cannot leave until the second shift has shown up because there will be no nurse or doctors so that’s the replacement doctor or nurse has to come in have to start before the first you know shift will finish so in rotations like that you will see start to finish but in construction we hardly ever see that alright so these are the four diagramming techniques that we use or the types of connections or dependencies that you see in PDM and you need to know them so anyways these dependencies that I’m showing you they’re not always going to be enforced so for it sometimes it is optional so for me to paint a wall yes the one has to be there so I get it that would be mandatory type relationship so the relationships sometimes can be mandatory in the sense that yeah it can only be done that way one has to be off the plastering has to be finished before you can paint it and then there’s the and then you have optional items such as this you know the discretionary wants these are the things that you can choose to do it one way or the other so let me show you okay all right so mandatory the one has to be up before I can paint it just clicking the mouse yeah and another name for the mandatory would be hard logic okay so they call it hard logic for a reason you cannot twist it you cannot change it it’s in force you have no choice it has to be done in the same way it’s mandatory and then you have the other one discretionary discretionary dependencies these are also called soft logic in the sense that they are like clay or dough play-doh you can twist it and turn it as you wish what would be considered soft logic painting the wall and installing the carpet see we always would like to paint the wall first and then install the carpet why because we don’t want to drip paint from the wall into the carpet right but let’s so we would always wait and we’ll say I paint the wall first to the carpet later but what if we’re in a hurry you know the lease is finishing from the old head orders and we have to hand over everything and we have to rush and finish the work is there anything that would prevent us from painting the wall and installing carpet at the same time physically the answer is no nothing really starts you it’s just that there’s a risk that paint will fall from the wall into the carpet and so what we’re doing here if we really really want to speed it up is we fast-track these activities we all relate them knowing full well that this is going to increase the level of risk and we take our precautions to make sure that the paint doesn’t really drip on the carpet we cover things you know we’re more careful so fast-tracking is an option when these dependencies are not hard dependencies if there are soft energy soft logic discretionary we can choose to do them at the same time I want you to remember the term fast-track because it’s an exam topic and as tracking would be on your exam you will be asked about it so you need to know that one and you need to know that that can only be done on optional relationships discretionary relationships alright there’s also the dependencies that we have on the outside or on the inside this is maybe suppliers sometimes we can get the product as expected and but and sometimes it’s weather conditions and then you also have the internal dependencies on your management to sign-off or other people to provide you information so these are dependencies so just because you have two activities that appear to be back-to-back like this there is no guarantee that when one of them is finished like this you know you expect that these will go in a specific order and you would expect that the moment this one is complete that that one will also start there’s no guarantee that there would not be a problem that prevents you in the middle here from starting on the next activity okay what if management did not get a certain permit in time that would prevent the next activity so just because they look like they’re back to back there’s no guarantee that that’s actually going to happen so these are the things that we refer to when we’re talking about you know internal dependencies or even you know external if we’re looking for permits but internal to be process related maybe we didn’t process the P or something that prevented the supplier from maybe sending the product something like that so it could be internal or external dependencies that could affect our ability to proceed as planned on the project besides this there are the leads and the lags and I used an example on the scheduling to show you what the lag does the lag gives you an enforced waiting period so I said you start the first code will wait one day that’s a lag of one day and then the second team starts the second code and that would be the lag so you could have a lag that puts a certain amount of time where successor activity will be delayed with respect to the predecessor activity successor afterwards predecessor before and there’s a time delayed are you putting in there a lead is the opposite of that and it’s the amount of time a successor activity can be advanced with respect to a predecessor activity so I have an example listed here but I want to show you what it looks like in open proj just for the sake of demonstration here we have a relationship alright so here we have a relationship that says finish to finish with a one day lag I want to change this to normal which is finished to start which is the common one and I want to put three day lag so this is what it looks like activity a first activity paint will finish three day lag happens and then the second activity which is five days happens total the activity is core five and five but there’s a waiting period of three that gives you 13 days total and you can see it here that that construction is going to take 13 days now if I went and changed it and I said it’s finished to start but we have a minus 2 day lag that’s exactly as like saying you have a two day deed because a negative log is the lead and a negatively it is a lag they’re quite the opposite okay so this is what it looks like you can start two days before I put two days lead right so I on the chart it doesn’t look that way but you can see that all because there’s a weekend in here so the weekend is playing the role so I’m just gonna go and change you know I can work on the calendar by the way I can say this is non default working time time now all seven days are working is I can even specify the working hours it’s a beautiful tool so now it looks more realistic when we look at the time yeah so I can start two days before you finish that’s finished to start normal back to back set of activities with a two day need if I have only a one day lead then it will be a minus one and that’s what it looks like so then I can start one day before you finish so that’s what leads and lags are obviously I’ve been mentioning you know it’s good to have a project management information system so if you do which the one I’m using now is a project management information system because I’m using it to attract the information of the project MS Project likewise Primavera all of these what you’re going to get at the end is what we call the project schedule network diagram this is what you see on the right it looks like an alien that is invading Earth and it’s just branching out but you know that’s what a project schedule network diagram looks like the only thing that doesn’t that prevents this from being called a schedule is that it doesn’t have the dates on it you notice all the boxes look the same fact or sequence in a certain way that’s what they expect to have happen at this point all the boxes are readied with the right relationship and you would have completed the sequencing
