Activities are the building blocks of a project

Activities are the building blocks of a project. They are the lowest level of a work breakdown structure (WBS) and, as such, are the smallest subdivision of a project that directly concerns the module.

If you divide activities into steps, an activity’s primary resource is typically responsible for managing and tracking the progress of the steps, while the project manager is typically responsible for managing and tracking the progress of the overall activity. This chapter describes how to add activities and their properties.

Activities Overview

Activities represent work that must take place in a determined amount of time. Use the Activity Table or Activity Network layouts to add activities and build your projects. Within these layouts, you can define the following activity information:

■Activity ID and name – to uniquely identify and describe the activity

■Predecessor and successor relationships – to define relationships with other activities in the same project or in different projects in the enterprise project structure (EPS)

■Activity start and finish dates

■Activity calendar

■Activity type, duration type, and percent complete type; whether an activity is a start or finish milestone; how to keep an activity’s unit values, duration values, and resource units/time values synchronized; and how to calculate an activity’s percent complete

■WBS element

■Activity codes and values – to categorize activities

■Constraints on the activity’s scheduled start and finish dates

■Expenses

■Work products and documents, standards, and deliverables

■Resources

■Roles – to identify skill requirements for staffing the activity

■Notes and feedback – to communicate with the resource working on an activity

■Notes about performing the activity

■Steps – to divide the activity into smaller units

■Activity Step Templates – to define sets of reusable steps common to many activities in a project or across projects