Appendix G. The Project Network Diagram

In every affair consider what precedes and what follows, and then undertake it.

—Epictetus Greek philosopher

Appendix Learning Objectives

After reading this appendix, you will be able to:

  • Construct a network representation of the project activities

  • Understand the four types of task dependencies and when they are used

  • Compute the earliest start (ES), earliest finish (EF), latest start (LS), and latest finish (LF) for every task in the network

  • Identify the critical path in the network

  • Analyze the network for possible schedule compression

Note

Most of the material in this appendix is an abridged version of Chapter 6 of my earlier work Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Third Edition (Wiley, 2003). It is presented here for completeness so that this book may be used as a text for an introductory course in software project management. For courses requiring more detail on these topics, the earlier work may be used as a companion text.

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