Sequencing activities

I find sequencing activities to be the most stressful piece of project management because if you get the order wrong, the entire project could go sideways. It isn't unusual to see (me) project managers gesticulating wildly at their computer screens and asking why the finish date just jumped out ten thousand days into the future. This tantrum is due to the order in which things occur, which affects the dates; then the resources you assign to the activities, which affect the level of effort; and finally the duration of the activities, which will affect everything else. This is the process of schedule creation, but it starts with sequencing activities and some crying.

The goal of sequencing is to determine the relationships between the activities and the dependencies that drive the sequence. There are many reasons why certain activities are performed in specific orders. Dependency determination is typically the first step when sequencing and may encourage...