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Supporting Activity Essay

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Provide real-world examples of activities where each dependency type is used: finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, and start-to-finish.

Finish-to-Start: the most common causal relationship hence no explanation is necessary for its usage.
Start-to-Finish: Rarely used but is useful when developing a schedule backwards from a fixed end date.
Start-to-Start: this represents a true relationship between two activities and has nothing to do with their predecessors. If I happen to have two tasks that start at the same time because of a predecessor, that is better represented as two finish-to-start relationships (e.g. systems testing & developing documentation can both begin once development is complete, but there is no …show more content…

Once negotiated with management, this estimate becomes your budget. As the project evolves, additional information is discovered and further estimates are produced. This is an extremely important process and we cannot emphasize enough the need for this re‐estimation or re‐budgeting process at each phase of the project. In any case, for the purpose of this article, we will call the revised budget the "actual budget." Another standard activity is to provide management with an expected cash flow. From a financial perspective this is an important activity, but it also can be used as your cost expectation.
As the project progresses, you monitor the actual spending which becomes your actual cost. This cost divided by your actual budget is the % spent, which can be compared to the expectation to provide an excellent guide to where you stand cost‐wise. However, with respect to progress, cost comparison alone is limited. A trend of the cost spending is a useful tool. Actual cost monitoring has several constraints. The major limitation is the availability of the data in real time. Indeed, most project accounting systems have major delays, usually due to the billing/payment system. It might take more than a month before an invoice gets into the accounting system. The best way to resolve this problem is to use a parallel real‐time approximated accounting system.
Invoices are accounted for as spent as soon as the work has been performed. Another inadequacy with

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