Add Dependencies and Lag and Lead Times to Tasks
Table of Contents
How to Add Dependencies and Lag and Lead Times to Tasks
Dependencies determine how your tasks and ultimately your schedule “hang together”, these are important if scheduling changes as impacts will reflect accurately. Lag and lead times will also help to determine your critical path and identify “slack” in the schedule.
- From your home or landing page of Project Online (POL), choose either Project Centre on the vertical menu bar, or Projects on the horizontal ‘tiles’ menu bar:
- This will display a grid list of projects. To get to the Project Site of any of these, click the hyperlink in the ‘project name’ column.
- This will display the Project Detail Page associated with that project. To access the project schedule, select Schedule from the vertical menu bar
- You will land on the last used view on the project schedule page. Next, click the down arrow underneath the Edit option in the project section of the top menu bar and choose In Browser.
- You will have a display message to say the project is now checked out to you for editing Select the Task tab on the top menu bar to display the associated drop-down menu.
- You can select from a number of pre-set views by clicking the drop-down box to the right of the View option. To add dependencies and lag and lead times to the tasks in your schedule, choose Tasks Schedule.
- This will display a Gantt chart view of your project schedule. Clicking the down arrow on any columns will give you the option to configure these. You will need to add the predecessor column
NOTE: If the predecessor column is not available in your configuration options, contact your POL administrator.
- You can now add dependencies such as Start-Start, Finish-Finish etc. to your schedule by typing the abbreviations into the relevant predecessor row e.g. in the example below Task 3 ‘Secure project sponsorship’ has a Start-Start dependency with Task 2 ‘Determine Project Scope’.
Finish Start (FS)
Finish Finish (FF)
Start Start (SS)
Start Finish (SF)
NOTE: The default for all tasks is generally Finish-Start (FS).
- You can also add lag and lead time with a plus (+) or minus (-) sign before the duration. You can also add elapsed time with an (e) before the duration, per example below.
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