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CPM sounds a lot like a PERT chart, which was invented in the 1950's to help design and build the Polaris nuclear submarines during the Cold War[0]. PERT has be
by yodon 4y ago
CPM sounds a lot like a PERT chart, which was invented in the 1950's to help design and build the Polaris nuclear submarines during the Cold War[0]. PERT has been part of Microsoft Project for decades, so it's readily available.
When you really need it (like in the case of tens of thousands of people trying to build and ship a single project at lighting speed) PERT is an extremely powerful and effective project management methodology. If, on the other hand, your "project management division" is you, it's a dangerously seductive time sink that will consume huge amounts of your time building and tuning and gathering and updating data and information, for arbitrarily close to zero direct real benefit and huge net negative benefit. The increase in effectiveness you gain from all that modeling is, in software development projects, negligible and the cost of doing all that modeling is much higher than you think it will be if you've never done it (that's why we don't do waterfall planning in software - it's not that no one's thought of it, it's that it's not effective on projects of any real complexity). As with any approach to planning, PERT works best at a particular scale and project type, and it's typically a quite large scale non-software project.
In my personal opinion, from a software development standpoint, the valuable part of building a PERT chart is doing the work and thinking required to draw a dependency map for your tasks. Drawing all those lines to show what has to be done before what is an incredibly effective tool for helping you flesh out and find dependencies (tasks) you hadn't realized needed to be on your list. Use something like MS Project to build that dependency diagram, then force yourself to stop using Project because it's too seductive at making you feel like the data is giving you power when it's really just consuming your brainpower ineffectively. Use dependency mapping to build a waterfall caliber understanding of what you need to build, then set it aside and use more appropriate agile style approaches to actually work through the project in an optimum manner (which often means not building it in exactly the way you mapped out originally).
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_review_technique https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_evaluation_and_revie...
- westurner 4y agoWBS: Work Breakdown Structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_breakdown_structure PERT -> see also -> "Project network" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_network : > Other techniques: The condition for a valid project network is that it doesn't contain any circular references.* > Project dependencies can also be depicted by a predecessor table. Although such a form is very inconvenient for human analysis, project management software often offers such a view for data entry. > An alternative way of showing and analyzing the sequence of project work is the design structure matrix or dependency structure matrix. design structure matrix or dependency structure matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_structure_matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_structure_matrix READMEs, Issues, Pull Requests, and Project Board Cards may contain Nested Markdown Task Lists with Issue (and actual Pull Request) # references: - [ ] Objective - [x] Task 1 +tag - [ ] #237 (GitHub fills in the Title and Open/Closed/Merged state and adds a *hover card*) - [x] Multiline Markdown list item indentation <URL|text|> - ID#: - Title: - Labels: [ ] - Description: | - htps://URL#yaml-yamlld - [x] Multiline Markdown list item indentation w/ --- YAML front matter delimiters --- - id: - title: - labels: [ ] --- - htps://URL#yaml-yamlld Time management > Setting priorities and goals > The Eisenhower Method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower... : | | Important | Not important | Urgent | | Not Urgent | From "Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 : > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment ... "Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12525141