Project Management: Planning, Critical Path, and MS Project

This report provides an understanding of project planning and its link to the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and project network. It explains how to calculate early, late, and slack activity times within a project schedule. The report emphasizes the importance of managing the critical path for effective project control, timely completion, and resource allocation. Furthermore, it details how to apply Microsoft Project for project planning and design, including creating projects, setting calendars, building task lists, entering task durations, creating summary tasks, and defining milestones. The report concludes with a list of references including books and online resources.

Project Management
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Table of Contents
Understanding of project planning and link between WBS and project network.......................3
Calculate early, late and slack activity time................................................................................3
Importance of managing critical path..........................................................................................3
How to apply Microsoft project in planning and designing project............................................3
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5
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Understanding of project planning and link between WBS and project network
Project planning is process of managing project and its activities in such a way goals and
objectives are achieved. It clarifies things that what to do and when. Moreover, it contains list of
tasks that are to be done to complete project.
It is analysed that WBS and project network are linked to each other. this is because WBS
shows break down of project in hierarchical way. furthermore, WBS is developed from project
network. also, work package from WBS is used to design activity in project network. so,
integration of these both enable in managing project (Glenn and Rose, 2019). However, network
use time estimate that is found work package of WBS. But in this time, budget and resources are
set without dates in WBS. Thus, dates are set after developing network.
Calculate early, late and slack activity time
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Importance of managing critical path
Critical path is process of identifying tasks and activities that are required to complete
project. It enables in effective controlling of project and completing it in specified time
(Importance of critical path, 2017). The importance of managing critical path is :
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Project schedule - the critical path helps in assigning each task to employee. With help of this,
it is easy to monitor and measure whether each employee is effectively performing his or her task
or not. Moreover, it is easy to make ensure that staff is working according to assigned task and in
given deadline. Alongside, the critical path makes sure that task is finished on time.
Prioritise key tasks – By managing critical task priority tasks are identified which helps in
focusing on it. thus, those tasks are completed first and then other. However, the impact of
critical path can be easily determined on project completion. Besides that, any delay in task is
determined and accordingly project is proceeded. Critical path incurs high priority in using
company resources (Jagannathan and Sethuraman, 2019).
Assigning deadlines – With help of critical path it is easy to assign deadline to each task. Thus,
it starts and finish activities and tasks as per date specified. The project manager is able to
maintain pace of activities with set deadlines.
How to apply Microsoft project in planning and designing project
Generally, a project is broken down into different stages so that it is completed in given
time. In order to do proper planning Microsoft project tool is used. It is applied as follows :-
Create a project – here, first of all a project is crated by launching Microsoft project. After than
project start date is set.
Set calendar- in this calendar is set which according to project need. Here, three categories are
there that is standard, 24 hours and night shift.
Building task list – the task list is built of project. in this project is broken down into different
tasks. Then, tasks are entered into Microsoft project in tabular format (Paciarotti and Bevilacqua,
2019).
Entering task duration – Now, task duration is entered for each task. This gives insight about
start and finish data of each task. However, task duration can be in terms of days, weeks, hours,
etc. depending on project deadline and task priority.
Creating summary task – It is a sub part of main task where activities are further broken. The
duration of sub task depends on the main task.
Creating milestone – they are some particular points on project timeline. It enables in
measuring progress of project.
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REFERENCES
Books and journals
Glenn, J. and Rose, K., 2019, October. Establishing Governance for Project and Service
Management. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGUCCS Annual Conference (pp. 145-
147).
Jagannathan, P. and Sethuraman, S., 2019. End-to end project management. U.S. Patent
10,198,702.
Paciarotti, C. and Bevilacqua, M., 2019. Project management in the international aid sector: the
perspective of Italian NGOs. The Journal of Modern Project Management, 7(3).
Online
Importance of critical path, 2017. [online] Available through : <https://bizfluent.com/info-
8446440-critical-path-important-project-schedule.html>
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