How precedence diagram work?

Answer 1

A precidence diagramme is a planning tool that allows a timescale and dependancies to be calculated on a project. A simple plan would to pour yourself a glass of fresh orange. The activities are enter kitchen, open fridge, get out drink, open cupboard, get out cup, close cupboard, open bottle, pour drink into cup, put lid back on bottle, place bottle back in fridge, close fridge. Each of these actiuvities has an order and has a duration of time, short though they may be. In addition some activities depend upon others being completed whilst others do not. all activities have to have taken place before the task is complete. a precidence diagramme would map these activities and give earliest and latest start and finish times to them. It is hard to show the diagramme in text but if you were to plan out the activity the first step would be enter the kitchen as nothing can be done without this step. Now this leads onto one of two next stages either open fridge or open cupboard each activity independent but both dependent upon being in the kitchen, from each of these two activities there are other activities the open firdge route goes on to get out bottle, open lid, and the open cupboard route goes to get out cup and that in turn to close cupboard, now the three activities we have are the orange is out of the fridge, the cup is out of the cupboard and the cupboard can be closed, pour orange into cup comes next dependant upon the bottle being out and the lid off and the cup out, so links are drawn from these two to the current pour drink activity, the close cupboard is not dependent so no line. replace lid, place back in fridge and close fridge are all dependent upon drink poured so are linear and linked to this and then to task complete, also task complete dependent opon that open cupboard being closed to that link goes here to, now all lines are connected through various dependent activities from start to finish. Next times are allocated and the diagramme is complete. Hope that helps and is not too confusing. If I can get a picture in here I will show more. Justyn