PERT charts offer an effective visual method to map out your project during its planning stage and identify all milestones, tasks and timelines related to it. They allow for calculating a visible path referred to as the critical path, providing you with an estimate of how long your team needs to complete all their tasks and deliver your product by the required date.
Your project schedule allows you to assign time estimates for each task, usually using optimistic (O), most likely (M), and pessimistic (P) timeframes as guideposts for time estimations. Arrows can also be used to show relationships among tasks – including predecessor/successor relationships.
PERT chart diagrams may offer many benefits to projects; however, they may not always be ideal. They cannot adequately handle complex financial aspects and taking time to assemble can make PERT Diagrams impractical for certain endeavors.
PERT charts provide an overall project scope that details activities with their associated time estimates, similar to Gantt charts; however, PERT provides more clarity into how each task affects other tasks, their dependencies, and potential issues that could arise.
PERT can be especially useful during the planning and initiation stages of any project, helping identify task interdependencies and choose its critical path while making milestone and project timeline estimation simpler.
PERT charts consist of nodes representing project tasks and arrows showing their sequence, along with any activity names and time estimates using formulas such as optimistic (O), most likely (M), or pessimistic (P). Depending on your project’s requirements, PERT Charts might include both parallel and serial activities and can pinpoint the fastest path towards project completion.
PERT is an invaluable project management tool that can assist in streamlining project planning and scheduling, particularly on complex projects where time is of the utmost importance. PERT helps project managers estimate how long a project will take without needing to know every task’s precise details or durations in detail.
An effective tool for creating realistic schedules and pinpointing project bottlenecks, this chart also serves as an invaluable resource to perform what-if analyses to pinpoint optimal workflow solutions, helping project managers avoid costly delays. Furthermore, its network chart provides a concise visualisation of large amounts of project information.
Though PERT Analysis can be effective, it has its limitations. It requires time and labor intensive analyses; moreover, accurate information on task dependencies and durations must be available in order to produce meaningful analysis results that don’t delay project deadlines or compromise success.
Jack’s client, a cyber security recruitment agency, requires an MVP of their website within 15 working days. To meet this deadline, Jack uses PERT to develop an accurate timeline with contingencies for any potential obstacles which might delay its development.
Jack begins by listing all of the tasks to be accomplished and their estimated durations, before exploring any dependencies among these tasks and noting which require others be completed first (e.g. coding the website before testing).
Jack then calculates how long it would take him to complete the Project under three different scenarios: optimistic, expected and pessimistic. This allows him to identify the critical path and anticipate where delays might occur so that buffers may be built accordingly. Furthermore, this data allows Jack to update estimates as he makes his development journey and monitor its progress more closely.