TABLE OF CONTENTS Your resource plan and commitment matrix will give you the essential first stages of constructing a network diagram: a list of activities and their duration. You also need to determine in which order the activities will be carried out.
The list of tasks that make up your project will include the number of person-days required to carry them out, but there are other things you need to know:
Elapsed time. What is the start and end date for the activity (i.e. how much time will have elapsed between start and finish)? A questionnaire survey may take only four days in realtime, but four weeks in elapsed time, from questionnaire design to return of completed forms. Be realistic about elapsed time, and look at your best and worst case scenarios. Make sure that you and the task owner agree about how long this task will take.
What is the activity dependent on? Is there another activity that needs to be completed before this one starts?
What is dependent on this activity? What other activities can't start until this one is finished? If you want your interviews to pick up on points made by questionnaire, this will determine the sequence of these activities.
What activities can be done simultaneously with this one? Some activities are totally independent from others and can be done while other work is progressing.
A network diagram is a graphic representation of activities over time and the dependency relationship between them.
