• Activity Bar – A bar which graphically represents an activity along a timescale. The length of the activity bar is proportional to the duration of the activity.
• Activity Relationship: An ordered link between 2 activities representing the order of execution.
The 4 relationship types are:
FS – Finish to Start
SS – Start to Start
FF – Finish to Finish
SF – Start to Finish
• Activity Type – An activity can be classified as one of the following types: Task, Hammock, Start Milestone, Finish Milestone, or WBS.
• Bar Chart: A chart on which activities are represented by Bars.
• The Bars length is represented by the activity Duration, and is lined-up on an X-axis time scale.
• Base Line: A set of dates and costs frozen at the start of the project and used as a basis for performance evaluation as the project progresses.
• Critical Path – One or more continuous chains of zero or negative float activities running from the start event to the finish event in the schedule
• Critical Activity – An activity with zero or negative float
• Constraint – A scheduling restriction you impose on the start or finish of an activity. Use constraints to reflect real project requirements; for example, all outdoor activities must be completed by the on-set of winter.
• Duration – The amount of time needed to complete an activity the original duration should be ideally calculated from a Standard Performance Rate of output.
• Early Dates – The earliest dates an activity can begin after its predecessors have completed, and can finish based on the completion of its predecessors in a conventional relationship.
• Excusable Delays are delays that are unforeseeable and beyond the control of the contractor.
• Early Finish – The date the project is due to finish, otherwise the earliest an individual activity can finish.
• Finish Milestone – An activity that represents the end of a series of activities for example it could represent a point in the project where weather tight is achieved. A milestone activity has zero original and remaining duration.
• Finish to Finish (FF) relationship – A relationship in which the finish of a successor activity depends on the finish of its predecessor activity.
• Finish to Start (FS) relationship – A relationship in which the start of a successor activity depends upon the completion of its predecessor activity.
• Float – The amount of time the start or finish of an activity can be delayed without affecting the project finish date.
• Free Float – The length of time you can delay the early start of an activity without delaying the early start of a successor activity.
• Hammock – An activity that spans a group of existing activities for summary purposes.
• Lag – An offset or delay from an activity to its successor.
• Late Finish: The latest possible date the activity must finish without affecting the target finish date for the project. Late Start: The latest possible start date for an activity to start without affecting the target finish date for the project.
• Non-Excusable Delays are delays that are foreseeable or within the contractor’s control.
• Negative float, also known as negative slack, is the amount of time beyond a project’s scheduled completion that a task within the project requires. … Negative slack can also indicate a scheduling problem when, for example, a task’s start date is set earlier than the end date for a preceding task in the critical path. Open ends: Any project Activities without a predecessor or a successor activity. All open-ended activities in a project should be assigned to a successor activity so as to represent the true float of the open-ended activity.
• Planning: Project planning is an essential part of project management, which relates to the use of schedules such as bar charts to plan and subsequently report progress within the project environment. Initially, the project scope is defined and the appropriate methods for completing the project are determined. Planning which includes budgeted time and costs is a fundamental part of the organisation’s Business Plan’
• Planned Cost: An approved estimated cost of resources and materials for the project.
• Planning Engineer: A specialist engineer who develops the project timescale schedules and manages them using a software package.
• Predecessor – An activity that must occur before another activity. A predecessor activity controls the start or finish date of its successor(s). An activity can have multiple predecessors, each with a different relationship to it.
• Predecessor Relationship – An activity that another activity depends upon
• Procurement: Procurement is the acquisition of goods, services or works from an outside external source.
• Project Control: The setting and monitoring of cost, resource levels, and key milestone deliverables plus the identification of early warnings, compensable events, variations, additional works and implementation of preventive and recovery actions of approved changes.
• Project: A project is a series of related a tasks which when they are carried in the correct order will lead to the completion of the project. … A construction project, sometimes just referred to as a ‘project’, is the organised process of constructing, renovating, refurbishing, etc. a building, structure or infrastructure.
• Relationship type – The condition that controls how an activity is related to its predecessors or successors.
• Schedule: A schedule is a listing of a project’s milestones, activities, and deliverables, usually ordered with intended start and finish dates. Those items are often estimated in terms of resource allocation, budget and duration, linked by dependencies and scheduled events.
• Schedule Contingency: Extra duration that is added to the project’s schedule baseline during the planning phase to reduce any impacts of unforeseen events.
• Schedule Risk: Falls in the categories of excusable and non-excusable delay events that jeopardize completing the project on time.
• Completion ‘S’ Curve: It shows the progress of work over time and form a historical record of project trends and variations. S–curves are used for different purposes. Some of the most common uses of S–curves are for progress and performance evaluation, cash flow forecasts, quantity output comparison, and schedule range of possibilities.
• Target Date: A fixed activity due date or deadline.
• The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS): WBS is a hierarchical and incremental decomposition of the project into phases, deliverables, and work packages. It is a tree structure, which shows a subdivision of effort required to achieve an objective; for example, a program, project, and contract.
• Total Float: Total float is the difference between the finish date of the last activity on the critical path and the project completion date.