8 – Job management

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the utility of job-management systems. A typical control system specifies when tasks should be carried out and how many men should be needed at each stage of the project. The most commonly used control technique is the “critical path” method. The critical-path method relies on two basic assumptions. The first assumption is that the task to be analyzed can be split into a number of distinct smaller tasks. The second assumption is that, apart from the first activity, each task cannot start until certain others have been completed. Critical-path programs allow the user to specify the resources required for each activity and also the total number of resources available. While scheduling the activities, the program would shift the starting dates of activities within their float times or if necessary increase the time of the project, to accommodate the activities within the resource limits. Various outputs are possible from most job-management programs. Perhaps the most familiar, and certainly one of the most useful, is the bar chart or Gantt chart. This presents in pictorial form the time-span of the tasks to be carried out and can show deadlines very clearly. Some job-management programs allow the user to specify scheduled starting dates for some activities. Deadlines can thus be incorporated in the network and the float times as the preceding activities would automatically adjust themselves. A useful application of this is to specify a finishing date for the project so that, when the network is processed, the appropriate starting date would be calculated.