Do you really know the meaning of the different tasks relationships? - Part 1 of 2

In this first podcast of two, Ricardo talks about the types of relationships between the activities in the schedule. It's a simple concept but a lot of people do not fully understand when putting it into practice. This week, Ricardo explains when to use the Finish-to-Start and Start-to-Start links. Next week, he will talk about the remaining two types, the End-to-End, and Start-to-Finish.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM. Podcast okay. I'd like to discuss with you are the kinds of relationship between two different tasks. It seems something very simple and very easy to learn, very easy to apply, but it's not. It's something very, very relevant that we need to understand when we want to make sure that we are doing a proper time management to our project, right? The first concept that a lot of people misunderstood is the concept of a predecessor and successor.

And a lot of people think, okay, predecessor is the task who comes first. So assessor is the task that comes later. It's wrong. This is only true. If you are linking two tasks in the finished, we start really like, so we need to reframe this concept. What is a predecessor? A predecessor is a task that you need to focus that you need to spend your energy because all the restrictions realized on the predecessor.

This will set up just waiting for the beginning or for the end of the predecessor. We need to understand this. So the focus should be always on the predecessor because the successor is just waiting for something to happen. And not necessarily the predecessor will come first. Okay? Maybe you just start something and then you need to finish it much later. So don't keep in mind that predecessor and successor are the tasks who comes first and who comes last in order to do this, we need to understand the four kinds of relationship in this podcast will be talking about it.

Start to finish, and we start to start a relationship. Next week, I'll be calling the order to what does it start to finish? Its the most traditional, the predecessor must Finish in order to start the successor. This is very our business. That by far the most useful and the easiest one we spend around 95% of the time planning using this kind of relationship. Let me give you an example. Let's suppose that you need to build up a wall and painted the wall.

So built a wall is the predecessor built a wall. It would be done in order to paint them. So this is a physical restriction. Most of the time finished, we start relationship our physical art. What we call a hard time logic. It's not a management decision. Its a physical restriction. I cannot paint a wall that doesn't exist. The second relationship is what we call it is start to start.

I need that. The predecessor just Start to start the successor. This is very useful. When that was, you don't want some kind of synchronization between to tasks. For example, I want to do an advertisement, a campaign and they made to put the advertisement in radio and on TV. Then I may decide, okay. I want to, as soon as we start the campaign in the radio, we will start the campaign on T V.

So it's a Start to start LINC and look, you may ask me, Ricardo why you are connecting physically the advertisement on TV and the ad in a radio. What's the difference? There is no difference because we are talking about for DIGIC relationship and not a physical relationship. One more dear LinkIt and connected because it's convenient for me that this two advertisement happen together.

Or with this relationship. Let me give you a very basic and simple example. Let's suppose that you need to put some tiles in the construction, in your kitchen and some tiles in your bathroom. There is no fiscal relationship between the bathroom and the kitchen, but you decided to build the storks together. So you said as soon as we start the kitchen, we start the bathroom because for me it's convenient because then I don't need to change the supplier. I don't need to change the provider.

I don't need to, by two different people to do quite the truest, I will keep the focus on my thing because it's pretty much the same work only into different positions. This is this strategic link and this we'll be very useful. When do we want to speed that up the projects? Because most of the time we can not work in the physical relationships next week, I wanted to discuss with you about the finish, the finish and they start to finish relationships and how we can manage this better in order to understand the concept of the critical path in our project.

But this is for Next week in another five minutes, BM Podcast.

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Do you really know the meaning of the different tasks relationships? - Part 1 of 2

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