Robert Gordon University

Project Management

A REPORT
ON

PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
PLANNING
TECHNIQUES
BY
SUSHIL GOSWAMI
0903143
3RD YEAR BEng MECHANICAL & OFFSHORE
ENGINEERING

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Project Management

CONTENTS
1. TERMS OF REFERENCE………………………………………………..page 3
2. SUMMARY………………………………………………………………….page4
3. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………….page6
4. PROJECT PLANNING TECHNIQUES/METHODS…………….page7
5. COMPARISON OF GANTT, PERT & CPM………………………page15
6. OTHER METHODS OF PROJECT PLANNING…………………page21
7. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….page25
8. REFERENCES……………………………………………………………..page26

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1.TERMS OF REFERENCE.

In the month of October 2009, Dr. C. MacLeod, lecturer for Project

Management (EN3800) instructed all third year undergraduate students of
stage 3 of BEng – Mechanical Engineering and BEng – Electrical
Engineering to prepare reports to compare the three main methods of
planning projects and to research any new developments in the area.

The report will cover the following sections:

 Outline the three planning techniques by taking a simple project

and producing a plan for it using the different methods.
 Contrast and compare the advantages and disadvantages of the
three planning methods.
 Outline any new methods of project planning developed in this
area.

The due date for this report is 27th November, 2009.

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2.SUMMARY

Project management has been practiced since early civilisation. In the mid of
19th century, project management saw tremendous progress due to the
progress made in various fields. In its present state, project management is a
highly structured process. Planning is one of the key processes involved in
project management. Over the last few decades, many planning techniques
have been developed. The three basic methods of project planning are
GANTT, PERT and CPM charts.

GANTT charts were originally developed by Henry Grant during the years of
1910-1915. GANTT charts continue to be popular and are now considered to
be a common charting technique. GANTT charts are similar to bar-charts.
GANTT charts are normally used to represent the timing of tasks required to
complete a process.

PERT chart was developed by US navy during 1950s. PERT charts are also
known as event labelled charts as the start and finish dates are shown in the
diagram. At its core, PERT is a management of probabilities, which it does
quite elegantly using simple statistics. It uses two types of techniques of
representation- activity on arc (AOA) and activity on node (AON). PERT chart
shows a network of activities and their interdependencies. Before an activity
could start, all its predecessor activities must have been completed. PERT
charts are normally used as a tool for planning and control of time.

CPM charts quite similar to PERT charts but the main focus of them is to
identify critical activities or critical path involved in a project. These are the
tasks or activities that a delay within will delay the whole project. At its core,
CPM is a deterministic tool which allows an explicit estimate of costs in
addition to time.

Although GANTT charts provide for an easy graphical visualisation of a

project but they fail to provide enough information on interdependencies of
the activities involved in a project. Besides, they suffer from other drawbacks
as well. For example, they can’t explicitly identify critical paths and fail to
show other resources. Some of these shortcoming are overcome by
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PERT/CPM charts. They provide for detailed planning, efficient monitoring

and control over project and proper use of resources in a project plan. They
can be easily understood and are adaptable to computers as well. PERT
charts recognise uncertainty in project time estimation as it is. While CPM
charts can easily identifies critical activities in a project. But as with
everything else in life, PERT/CPM too suffer from some drawbacks. PERT
gives a rough estimation of the uncertainty in the final completion time of a
project. These network diagrams tend to be large and unwieldy sometime.
There is always inherent danger of laying too much emphasis on critical
paths. Although CPM/PERT charts tend to be more compact than the GANTT
charts, but they do it at the cost of a linear time scale.

In addition to the three basic planning methods/techniques, there are other

methods like PRINCE2, DSM and IDEF3 which are used in the industry for
project plans.

PRINCE2 is a process-based method for effective project management. It

primarily covers management, control and organisation of a project.

DSM is a simple tool to perform both the analysis and the management of
complex systems. As a management tool, it provides a project representation
that allows for feedback and cyclic task dependencies.

IDEF3 is a business process modelling method. This method is designed to

understand the knowledge about how a particular system works. It can be
divided into two categories:

1. PF- process flow diagrams.

2. OSTN- object state transition network diagrams.

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3. INTRODUCTION

Projects are one-off pieces of work in the form of related tasks, or activities
which when completed within a fixed timescale satisfy one or more
objectives. Since early civilisation, project management has been practiced.
By 1950s, project management saw a tremendous development as a
discipline due to the progress made in the fields of construction, engineering,
telecommunications, and defence. Examples of projects which influenced the
development of modern project management as we know it today include a)
Polaris missile project, 1956; b) Apollo project, 1960; and c) E.I. du Pont de
Nemours chemical plant project, 1958. (1)

Project management in its present state is a highly structured process. It can

be broken down into following steps:

1. Initiation
2. Planning
3. Execution
4. Monitoring
5. Controlling
6. Completing a plan/project as specified.

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4. PROJECT PLANNING TOOLS/TECHNIQUES

According to ‘Project Management Body of Knowledge’, A project plan is a

formal, approved document used to guide both project execution and project
control. The primary uses of the project plan are to document planning
assumptions and decisions, facilitate communication among stakeholders,
and document approved scope, cost, and schedule baselines. A project plan
may be summarized or detailed. (2)

There are three basic systems used to prepare the plan. There are few others
but are normally mixtures of elements from two or more of the basic
systems.

The systems are:

 GANT chart – A Bar Chart Technique

 PERT – Program Evaluation and Review Technique
 CPM – Critical Path Method (3)

We will be looking at these 3 techniques in more detail by using an example.

Let’s just say a family is preparing to go a football game. Their house has 2
showers. Mother insists that the entire family eats together at breakfast
time. Their morning preparations are shown below:

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No. Task Duration Person Depends on

1. Alarm goes off 5 minutes Father None
2. Wake family 5 minutes Father 1
3. Mum shower 40 minutes Mother 2
4. Son shower 30 minutes Son 2
5. Walk dog 10 minutes Father 2
6. Father shower 15 minutes Father 5
7. Prepare breakfast 15 minutes Mother 3
8. Eat breakfast 15 minutes All 7
9. Load car 5 minutes All 8
10. Drive car 25 minutes all 9
(The above example has been adapted from
http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au/vceit/ganttpert/buffalo/buffalo-
pert.htm)

GANTT chart: The chart is commonly known after Henry Gantt who designed
this chart around the years 1910-1915. (4). In general, a GANTT chart is a
kind of bar chart which illustrates a project schedule. It represents the timing
of tasks required to complete a project.

Now, let’s have a look at the GANTT chart on the next page made using
Microsoft Project.

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Project Management

The above GANTT chart shows the different tasks involved in the project.
Each task takes up one row. Time runs along the top in increment of minutes.
The expected time for each task is marked by a horizontal bar whose left end
marks the expected beginning of the task and whose right end marks the
expected completion time. For example, the task ‘WAKE FAMILY’ is expected
to start at the end of the 5th minute and finish at the end of the 10th minute.
It spans over duration of 5 minutes. (4, 5)

GANTT charts are simple to design and easy to construct. GANTT charts give a
clear illustration of project status, but one problem with them is that they
don’t indicate task dependencies. We can’t tell how one task falling behind
schedule affects other tasks. (4, 5)

Now, let’s have a look at PERT chart for the same project.

PERT chart: A PERT chart is a project management tool used to schedule,

organise and coordinate tasks within a project. PERT stands for Project
Evaluation Review Technique and this methodology were developed by U.S.
Navy in the 1950s to manage the Polaris submarine missile program. (6, 7)

Complex projects require a series of activities. An activity is a task which

must be performed and an event is a milestone marking the completion of
one or more activities. Before an activity can begin, all of its predecessor
activities must be completed.

PERT is known as event labelled because the start and finish are noted in the
diagram.

prepare finish
breakfast breakfast

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A PERT is constructed from a series of start and end elements like the ones
shown above.

ALARM GOES OFF ID: 1 WAKE FAMILY ID: 2 MUM SHOWER ID: 3

DUR: 5 MINS RES: DAD DUR: 5 MINS RES: DAD DUR: 40 MINS RES: MUM

SON SHOWER ID: 4 PREPARE BREAKFAST ID: 7

DUR: 30 MINS RES: SON DUR: 15 MINS RES: MOM

WALK DOG ID: 5

EAT BREAKFAST ID: 8
DUR: 10 MINS RES: DAD
DUR: 15 MINS

RES: MOM, DAD, SON

FATHER SHOWER ID: 6

DUR: 15 MINS RES: DAD

LOAD CAR ID: 9

DUR: 5 MINS

RES: DAD, MUM, SON

DRIVE TO GAME ID: 10

ARIVE AT GAME ID: 11
DUR: 25 MINS
MILESTONE
RES: DAD, MUM, SON

PERT chart: Sample Project

In the above PERT chart, tasks- ‘mum shower’, ‘son shower’ and ‘walk dog’
are concurrent or parallel tasks as they all start off at the completion of task-
‘wake family’ and are completely independent of each other. Now, the task-
‘eat breakfast’ can’t start unless tasks- ‘prepare breakfast’, ‘father shower’
and ‘son shower’ have been completed. The event- ‘arrive at game’ is the
milestone here and indicates the completion of the project. (4, 5). A

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milestone could be defined as an event of zero duration which marks a

significant point of progress in a project. Milestones are used to see whether
a project is on time or not. A milestone may be “Design is finished”, “Sign
contract”, “Project Ends” etc. (7)

CPM chart: The critical path method (CPM) is a step-by-step technique for
process planning that defines critical and non-critical tasks with the goal of
preventing time-frame problems and process bottlenecks. The CPM is ideally
suited to projects consisting of numerous activities that interact in a complex
manner. The CPM was developed in the 1950s by DuPont, and was first used
in missile-defence construction projects. Since that time, the CPM has been
adapted to other fields including hardware and software product research
and development. (8)

A CPM chart generally needs a list of activities for a project where each
activity has a list of predecessor activities. Critical Path Method (CPM) charts
are similar to PERT charts and are sometimes known as PERT/CPM. In a CPM
chart, the critical path is indicated. A critical path consists of set of
dependent tasks (each dependent on the preceding one) which together take
the longest time to complete. Although it is not normally done, a CPM chart
can define multiple, equally critical paths. Tasks which fall on the critical path
should be noted in some way, so that they may be given special attention.
The critical path for any given method may shift as the project progresses;
this can happen when tasks are completed either behind or ahead of
schedule, causing other tasks which may still be on schedule to fall on the
new critical path. (8, 9)

We would be using the AOA (activity on arc) form of the CPM chart for the
afore-mentioned project.

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Figure: PERT chart

(The above diagram has been adapted from

http://www.mckinnonsc.vic.edu.au/vceit/ganttpert/buffalo/buffalo-
pert.htm)

In the example above, notice the dummy tasks leading from tasks 4 and 6 to
task 8. They indicate that task 8- ‘eating breakfast’ cannot commence until
tasks 4- ‘son shower’ and 6- ‘father shower’ are completed. Also, task 8
cannot start until it predecessor, task 7- ‘prepare breakfast’ is complete.
Hence, a dependency must be shown for tasks 4 and 6 leading to task 8. But
if we draw normal task arrows from task 4 and 6, it means that something

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needs to be done on those arrows, but there is no task, just the dependency.
So, we use dummy (dotted) lines which show that a dependency exists even
though there is no task between the two tasks. (5, 8)

Now, we can clearly see that critical path here in this example is Alarm, Wake
All, Mum Shower, Prepare Breakfast, Eat breakfast, Load car and Drive. If any
of these tasks get delayed, the whole plan will get delayed. (5, 8)

The minimum time the family would take before they could reach the
football game after the alarm goes off is the total of the critical task
durations= 5+5+40+15+15+5+25=110 minutes. (5)

In the above PERT chart, the critical path has been shown by darker arrows.

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5. COMPARE GANTT, PERT & CPM.

In this section, we would be comparing the three techniques/methods viz.

GANTT, PERT and CPM.
Let’s have a look at the advantages disadvantages of the GANTT chart
technique.
ADVANTAGES:
1. They provide an excellent presentation tool for
illustrating groups of milestones and demonstrating
individual resources scheduled to time,
2. They can used in status reporting to show how much of
the plan has been completed by displaying the progress
of an activity in the same or parallel bar, or using
colour,
3. Many executives prefer this presentation format due to
its simplicity and ease of display on one single screen.
4. They also allow a quick identification of the critical path
in the process.
5. They allow tasks to overlap partially, which is often not
allowed by other methodologies/techniques.
6. All tasks are visible in relationship to others.
7. Deadlines are clearly shown. (4, 10, 11)

DISADVANTAGES:
1. Estimates must be complete before the chart could be
drawn.
2. A GANTT chart does not effectively address the
dependencies between jobs (although constraints can
be added as vertical lines).
3. Dependencies are hard to verify.
4. It is difficult to show two sets of dates when using
techniques such as earliest start date and latest start
date.

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5. It is difficult to show slack and critical path without

additional notation.
6. GANTT charts present a deterministic schedule of a
process. There is no room for probabilistic distribution
of tasks, each task is assumed to have a definite
duration whatever the circumstances, which may not
be a very realistic assumption.
7. Changes to the schedule require a redrawing of the
chart.
8. Several scheduling possibilities cannot be shown in the
same chart.
9. Resource assignments are not easy to illustrate.
10.The GANTT chart does not highlight WBS elements with
the highest risk of failure or delay. (10, 11, 4)

Advantages and disadvantages of PERT are as listed below:

ADVANTAGES:

1. PERT charts help defining explicit and visible

dependencies between the WBS elements.
2. Critical path for a project could be easily identified
using PERT charts.
3. Elements like early start, late start and slack time for
each activity can be easily identified early using PERT
charts.
4. Similar to CPM charts, PERT provides for potentially
reduced project duration due to better understanding
of dependencies leading to improved overlapping of
activities and tasks where feasible.
5. Unlike CPM, the probabilities of successfully meeting
deadlines, finishing early, or finishing late can be easily
assessed by the use of PERT.
6. One key advantage of PERT charts is that they can be as
simple or as complicated as needed.

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7. As PERT charts tend to be using probabilistic time

estimates, they can effectively used for non-repetitive
jobs like research and development work, where time
and cost estimates tend to be quite uncertain. (10, 12,
13, 4, 14, 15)

DISADVANTAGES:

1. The PERT charts tend to be large and unwieldy

requiring several pages to print and requiring special
size paper.
2. Time estimates tends to be subjective and are subject
to fudging by managers.
3. There can be potentially hundreds or thousands of
activities and individual dependency relationships.
4. It’s harder to show the status of a project because of
the lack of the timeframe on most of the PERT charts.
5. In real-life, projects will hardly execute exactly as they
were planned due to uncertainty. In such a case, PERT
charts may provide inaccurate information about the
project completion time due to the reason of
uncertainty. Sometime, this inaccuracy is large enough
to render such estimates as not helpful. (10, 12, 13, 4,
14, 15)

CPM shares most of the advantages and disadvantages of PERT charts. Both
of them being network diagrams have many common key advantages and
benefits and suffer from many similar limitations.

Let’s have a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages of CPM:

ADVANTAGES:

1. The use of CPM forces management to plan in detail

and to define what must be done to accomplish
objectives/targets on time.
2. As management is forced to make commitments
and plan for execution times and completion dates,

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CPM provides for better communication among the

various departments in an organisation and
between suppliers and the client.
3. CPM also helps management to efficiently control
and monitor a project by early identification of
critical activities. Usually in a project, the number of
critical activities is only a small portion of all the
activities. Identification of the critical activities
enables the use of an efficient monitoring system
concentrating only on the critical activities.
4. CPM helps in identifying potential problem areas.
The critical activities are also more likely to become
problem areas. Once identified, contingency plans
may be devised.
5. CPM provides for wise allocation of resources to
different activities by examination of the overall
plan. For example, resources can be transferred to
bottleneck or trouble areas from other activities, if
required. Also, it also identifies which can be
delayed for a while if resources need to be
reallocated to catch up on missed tasks.
6. Likewise PERT charts, CPM are also easily adaptable
to computer use. Diagramming of the networks and
planning large projects can be easily done by
computers.
7. Unlike PERT, CPM enables management to evaluate
trade-offs between the cost of executing a job in a
normal way or expediting activities (also known as
crashing) at a higher cost so as to finish earlier.
8. Likewise PERT charts, CPM charts can be easily
understood as they provide a method to visualise an
entire project. Hence, they could be easily explained
to supervisors and employees in such a way that
chances of implementation are increased. (14, 15,
16, 17, 4, 10, 13)

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DISADVATAGES:

1. In CPM, there is only one estimate of duration

unlike PERT where it uses three time estimates.
Thus, CPM is a deterministic tool. It cannot be
used as effectively as PERT charts to define the
probabilities of meeting deadlines, finishing early,
or finishing late in a project.
2. CPM charts sometime lay too much emphasis on
critical path activities.
3. Precedence relationship must be specified and
networked together.
4. Although CPM/PERT charts tend to be more
compact than the GANTT, but they do it at the
cost of a linear time scale. The time resources
required by a task are given numerically, rather
than appearing graphically in a horizontal
dimension. This may make it harder to see which
tasks/activities are using the most time
resources.
5. As in the PERT charts, there could be potentially
hundreds or thousands of activities and individual
dependency relationships.
6. One key assumption of CPM is that the key
constraint to the accomplishment of a process is
time. Yet, the goal of many processes may be the
minimisation of required time, the limiting
constraint may often stem from other resources.
When a resource other than time is the limiting
factor, then PERT diagrams can still be useful
tools to visualise dependent sequence of steps.
(14, 15, 16, 17, 4, 10, 13)

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By now, we have seen the various aspects of GANTT, PERT and CPM charts.
While GANTT charts provide an easy graphical representation of when
activities (might) take place, they don’t clearly indicate details regarding the
progress of activities. Beside, they fail to show dependencies between
different activities. Some of these shortcomings of GANTT charts are solved
to a large extent by network diagrams like CPM and PERT charts. These
charts show interdependence of various activities by means of connecting
arrows called network techniques. GANTT charts fail at providing enough
information about critical activities which govern the success or failure of a
whole project. CPM/PERT charts identify these critical activities. Further,
these techniques can also tell us how close the remaining activities are to
becoming critical (this available delay is also called slack or float). (4, 17, 14)

PERT and CPM are very similar in their approach; however, two distinctions
are usually made. The first relates to a way in which activity duration are
estimated. In PERT, three time estimates are used to form a weighted
average of the expected completion time, based on a probability distribution
of completion times. Therefore, PERT is a probabilistic tool. This makes PERT
a better tool for non-repetitive jobs like research and development work,
where time and cost tend to be quite uncertain. In CPM, there is only one
estimate of duration; that is, CPM is a deterministic tool. This makes CPM a
better tool for jobs of repetitive in nature where activity time estimates can
be predicted with considerable certainty due to the existence of past
experience. The second difference is that allows CPM allows for an explicit
estimate of costs in addition to time. Thus, while PERT is basically a tool for
planning and control of time, CPM can be used to control both the time and
the cost of the project. (14)

For complex, time-critical projects, the CPM/PERT charts might be useful in

providing a clear indication of the critical sequences of tasks necessary to
keep the project on schedule.

Over the time, CPM and PERT charts have merged together into one single
technique. Extensions of both CPM and PERT allow the user to manage other
resources in addition to money and time, to trade-off resources, to analyse
different types of schedules, and to balance the use of resources. (4, 14, 17)

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6. OTHER METHODS OF PROJECT PLANNING

Some of the alternative methods/techniques used in the industry are as

follows:
 IDEF3- Integrated Definition for Function Modelling 3: it is a
business process modelling method. The IDEF3 method is a
scenario-driven process flow description capture method designed
to understand the knowledge about how a particular system works.
IDEF3 captures the temporal information including precedence and
causality relationship between various processes and their
associated tasks. IDEF3 process mapping comes in two forms,
process flow (PF) and object state transition network (OSTN). A
process flow description captures the knowledge of how things
work: for example, the description of what happens to a part as it
passes through a sequence of manufacturing processes. The second
form of IDEF3 process mapping is object state transition network
which summarises the allowable transitions an object may undergo
throughout a particular process. In short, the PF describes the
internal workings of the processes, while the OSTN describes the
interfaces to the processes. These two views are used together to
fully describe the system, organisation, or business process.(10, 18)

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(The above two diagrams have been taken from:

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/enterprise-solutions/idef3-models-
process-description-18705)

 DSM- Design Structure Matrix: it is a simple tool to perform both

the analysis and the management of complex systems. It was first
introduced by Don Steward in 1981. It helps capture the important
relationships in a complex system. It enables a user to model,
visualise and analyse the dependencies among the entities of any
system. As a management tool, it provides a project representation
that allows for feedback and cyclic task dependencies. This is
extremely important since most engineering applications exhibit
such cyclic property. As such, this representation often results in an
improved and more realistic execution schedule for the
corresponding design activities.
The method consists in recording in a square matrix all the
interactions inside a system and in deducing a better organisation
from these interactions. We will take a simple abstract example to
understand this method. The left part of the figure below shows a
system of 6 elements. Let us suppose that the elements represent
the tasks that need to be completed in a design process. The tasks

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are randomly numbered in the chart, and they influence each other
through the pattern of arrows. It’s quite difficult to understand and
visualise the structure of the example through the diagram in the
left part. On the right side of the figure is the corresponding DSM
that maps the interactions between the process tasks, listed in rows
and columns in same order. The matrix is filled with oriented
interactions from the elements in columns to the elements in rows.
Thus, looking at the off-diagonal marks in a column, task 7 in the
example figure below will describe which other tasks on the output
of the task corresponding to the column. Similarly, the off-diagonal
marks within a row, 5 in the example, represent all of the tasks
whose output is required to perform the task corresponding to that
row, i.e. 1, 3 and 8 in the example. The diagonal cells are usually
meaningless since they would represent a dependency of a task on
itself. (10)

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 PRINCE2: Project in controlled environments is a process-based

method for effective project management. It was first developed by
the UK government in 1989 as the standard approach to IT project
management for central government. It primarily covers
management, control and organisation of a project. PRINCE2 refers
to the second major version of this method and is a trademark of
the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), an independent office
of HM treasury of United Kingdom. The key features of the PRINCE2
are: a) its focus on business justification, b) a defined organisation
structure for the project management team, c) its product-based
planning approach, d) its emphasis on driving the project into
manageable and controllable stages, e) its flexibility to be applied at
a level appropriate to the project. This method has mostly been
adopted in Western Europe and Australia. It almost has no presence
in the rest of world including US, India and China. (19, 20)

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7.CONCLUSION
Project management is a highly-structured process in its present state and
there are many methods/techniques which can be employed to prepare a
plan. The three basic systems which are commonly used are GANTT, PERT
and CPM. Each of them has its own place in a project plan. A GANTT chart is
quite useful for easy graphical visualisation of a project but it suffers from
many drawbacks. For example, it fails to provide enough information about
the interdependencies of different activities involved in a project. On the
other hand, PERT/CPM charts enable a user to identify critical activities in a
project. While PERT can be used for planning and control of time, CPM charts
can be used to control both time and cost of a project. CPM charts are quite
similar to the PERT charts but include an explicit indication of the ‘critical
path’. Otherwise, CPM shares same strengths and weaknesses as the PERT,
and the two are often lumped together as one technique. (4, 14)

Extensions of both PERT and CPM allow user to manage resources in

addition to time and cost, to trade off resources, to analyse different types of
schedule, and to balance the use of resources. For complex and time-critical
projects, the CPM/PERT charts might be useful in providing a clear indication
of the critical sequence of tasks necessary to keep the project on schedule.
(4, 14)

There are other methods/techniques available as well in addition to the

three basic systems. Some of them are PRINCE2, DSM, and IDEF3 etc.
Depending upon the types of projects involved, different planning techniques
find their respective application in project plans.

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8.REFERENCES
1. Sandro Azzopardi, The Evolution of Project Management Part2,
accessed on 5th November 2009. Available from:
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Project Management

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prince2.asp

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Project Management

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