Meanings of the Four Types of Task Relationships in Microsoft Project The idea is to see for ourselves and understand how they show up on our project and in the Gantt chart.Ĭontinue to to learn more about the meanings of task relationships in Microsoft Project. Thus for Tasks 3 and 4, we have defined two predecessors each. Enter Task 1 in the second row with type as SF. Also enter Task 2 in the second row and define the relationship type as FF Open the predecessor tab in the dialog window. In the meantime, complete the relationships for Tasks 3 and 4 as follows: We will come to the meaning of each of these in a moment.
To understand the different types of task relationships that can be defined in Microsoft Project, and to learn how to define these Types of Task Relationships in Microsoft Project Note: When finished with this lesson, be sure to check out the other Microsoft Project tutorials available at Bright Hub. The sequencing constraints are indicated in Microsoft Project using Task Relationships. We will take up capacity constraints in a later lesson after we define resources in our project.
The two major constraints that we will indicate to Microsoft Project are: The question then is how do we indicate the constraints that need to be considered while scheduling the tasks in a project to the MS Project application. As you are aware, any scheduling activity will need to take the constraints into consideration in order to come up with a practical and meaningful schedule.
After having defined a project in terms of the planned tasks, we also need to address the more important part of project management - the part related to project scheduling.
The very purpose behind breaking a project down into smaller, manageable tasks is that this process of work breakdown makes project planning easier. Now, let us understand what we mean by task dependencies or task relationships, and what their role in defining a project is. Then in the second lesson, where we talked about task Insertions and amendments, we briefly touched upon task relationships, and we said that we would take the topic up later. We also pointed out that Microsoft Project will, by default, assume that all tasks start on the Project start date. In the first lesson on Getting Started with Microsoft Project, we saw how to define tasks in the MS Project application.