What makes a good project schedule?
This is probably the wrong question. The question should be what makes a good network of activities from which the project schedule can be derived? • No widows or orphans – every task has a start and an end. It has some explicit reason for being there. “Why does this task start?” “What does this task deliver to the project?” are questions that need to be asked. There are only two tasks, start (authorization to proceed), end (period of performance complete) that don’t have a start or an end respectively • Have as few hard constraints as possible – “as soon as possible” should be the predominate constraint. “Start no earlier than” and “Finish no later than” are the only two constraints that should be used. There are others of course but they will simply foul up the assessment of the network, introduce “bugs” in the plan and cause the backward pass of Microsoft Project’s Critical Path engine to produce wrong numbers. • Negative or large positive slack – once all the tasks are connected in
