OE1-4.4 Project & Time Management

Work through these

• Project organization during the construction phase

  Organising the work when something is actually being built. It is the setting the two scheduling methods below were developed for.

• Project planning and control using CPM

  The scheduling method that assumes known durations. Drawing the network by hand once is what makes the critical path idea concrete.

• Project planning and control using PERT

  The variant that handles uncertain durations by using three estimates. Comparing the two shows what the extra effort buys.

• The critical path and float

  The longest path through the network, and the slack everywhere else. Knowing where the float is tells you where a delay is free and where it is not.

• Human aspects of project management

  The part the network diagram does not show, which is that people do the work. It is the item most likely to be skipped and most likely to matter.

• Approaches to time management and their strengths and weaknesses

  Managing your own time rather than a project's, with the honest limitations of each approach. No system survives contact with a genuinely overloaded week.

• The time management matrix

  Sorting work by urgency against importance, which is the most useful single idea in this topic. The important and not urgent quadrant is the one that gets squeezed out.

• Urgency addiction

  The habit of treating urgency as a proxy for value, which the matrix above makes visible. Recognising it in yourself is the point of the item.