Deeper Dive - Inside the Activity Network Diagram - October 25, 2022
Efficiency and realistic schedules are built on knowing what needs to be done in the right order
Getting the game plan ready
Nothing is more frustrating that watching your team play football and throughout the game they are always facing the dreaded the “third and long”; the circumstance where the team has one attempt to make a long yardage play or they will punt the ball away. Invariably, you will think that if they just called or implemented better plays on first down and second down, the team wouldn’t be facing the haunted third and long.
The same thing happens in our organizations. We have a great idea and sometimes we don’t think through the first few steps of a process and the next thing we know, we are in third and long. If we can’t make this long yardage play, we will have to punt the idea to the sideline.
So, how can we better plan on first and second down? Well, the Activity Network Diagram is a tool that we can to help us. The diagram helps see where team members contribute to the task and the success of the team, it helps uncover unrealistic timetables and focuses our attention on the truly critical tasks we have to accomplish. It can be a pretty powerful tool.
Getting Started
Before we really dive into the diagram, we need to do a few things first. First, we need to get the right team members at the table, these would be the members with first hand knowledge of the work at hand. Once we have all our team members we need to start to document all the tasks needed to complete a project. These tasks need to be on sticky notes. Once we are looking at a board full of sticky notes, we can start asking questions.
The Right Questions to Ask
The first question to ask is, “What needs to be done first?” This might seem like a pretty obvious questions, but getting everyone on the same page will help ensure a strong process. Once everyone agrees on that task, place that sticky note on the far left of the board.
The next question to ask is, “What is the next task that needs to be done?” and we place this task just to the right of the first task. Mapping out this process will begin to demonstrate how individuals are contributing to the team and making the process work.
Another question we might want to ask is “Are there any tasks that can be done simultaneously?” If there are simultaneous tasks, put these tasks underneath the tasks that are also being done at the same time. Your diagram could start looking like this:
We need to repeat this process until all our sticky notes are ordered. Of course, as we work with our team members, we may end up shifting the order or making changes. All of that is perfectly fine. We need to remember before we start improving the process, we need clarity among the whole team on what the process looks like.
Once we have all our tasks in order, it is extremely helpful to write down on each sticky note how much time elapses for each task that takes place. It is also extremely important to get consensus on these times. Your diagram should look something like this:
At this point, we can start looking at the project’s critical path. There are a few things we can look at as we start looking at our process.
Any delay to a task on the critical path should be added to the project’s completion time, unless another task is accelerated or eliminated. Likewise, the project’s completion time can be reduced by accelerated any task on the critical path.
There are two options for calculating the total path and tasks included with it:
Longest Cumulative Path - At this point we can identify total project completion time by adding up each path of the connected activities.
Calculated Slack - Calculate the starting and completing times of each task. This identifies which task must be completed as scheduled on the critical path and those that have latitude.
At this point in our above example, we know the process must take place over 7 days. And we know during those seven days, our person doing Task 2B is going to be on the task 2 less days than the person on Task 2A.
This can add some additional questions, what interaction do those team members have in those tasks? Can we divide the tasks where the individual on Task 2A give some work to the individual to Task 2B so they can both work 4 days, therefore cutting out some waste in the process? Are Tasks 2A and 2B actually interrelated so our process looks more like this?
In this chart, we have determined that the tasks aren’t necessarily simultaneous, but the tasks are actually interrelated and Task 2A can’t be done without Task 2B. Once Task 2B is done, we learned we have everything we need to complete Task 2A and we actually cut task time from 1 week to 2 days.
Completing this process with our team and our full catalog of tasks, we should have a very comprehensive view of our process, a better understanding of our process with our team members, the valuable contributions our team members are making and a realistic timeline to complete a task.
Hopefully this a nice little tool to help you out! If you have any comments or questions our need a little help to get this going on your team, please feel free to reach out by sending me an email at pinnaclestrategiesltd@gmail.com.
Onward and Upward,
Bill