Project Management Techniques: CPM and PERT:

Basic Techniques and its Importance

The two best known network planning models are Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM). PERT and CPM are similar in most respect, except for few extra modification incorporated into PERT and not found in CPM. The CPM was developed for scheduling maintenance shutdown. It is depend on an assumption that project activity times may be estimated accurately without any variation. Whereas, PERT was developed for scheduling the uncertain time estimates activities.

The two methods used for the critical path analysis, are widely utilized in project management problems. The CPM deals with purely deterministic problems and PERT allows randomness in the activity times. The primary elements for the critical path analysis are:

Project

A unique venture with a starting and one end, undertaken by people to meet established goals within described constraints of time, resources, and quality.

Activity

The project is broken into a set of indivisible activities by its planner. This is the most difficult part of the project management, i.e. to discover the best possible way of breaking the project into a collection of distinct activities.

Activity Relationship

A significant part of the project planning is to determine the relationship between the activities, that means. to determine the precedence constraints and describe the logical sequence to complete the project

Project Scheduling

This is the specification of the starting and ending times of all of the activities belonging to the projects.