Step 4 — Activity Listing

Step 4 Activity Listing

Consider the type of schedule that is being developed. Is it a high level summary schedule or a detailed hour by hour maintenance schedule. Consider the unit of measurement. ie hours, days, weeks or months.

Consider the overall duration of the proposed project and the duration units.

Does the contract or specification nominate maximum task durations for activities in the schedule?

All the activities required to achieve the project scope must be defined. 

There should be an adequate number of activities to accurately plan and model the project’s full scope of works. 

The level of detail within a schedule should be consistent with the level of discussion to understand and deliver the works. 

Schedules with too few activities will not be detailed enough to plan and forecast the project’s deliverables accurately and will make it difficult to define critical paths, to track progress and to identify delays and their causes. In most cases programs should contain a consistent level of detail for each phase of works.

Schedules with too many activities can become difficult to manage and may be ignored by those who need to understand it.

Excessive activities will not add value to the schedule’s logic, critical path, float values and forecast accuracy. They can clutter the program and place additional demand on planning resources in maintaining and updating the schedule.

Activity descriptions should contain verbs, nouns, and area descriptions so that the activity can be easily identified. For example, ‘Install structural steel level 2 to 3’ is easier to understand than ‘SS L2/3’.

Consider intelligent activity naming. For a multilevel building project – slab formwork could be a repetitive task, but in isolation the task description does not clearly describe the location of the task. Whereas, South Tower – Level 2 (North) Slab formwork identifies the following :

Avoid including dissimilar or unconnected works in one single activity. For example, ‘Pour Concrete Level 2 Slab’ complies; however, ‘Pour Concrete Level 2 Slab and Lay Pavers Ground Floor’ does not because it contains two unconnected works in the one activity.

Consider the continuity of work described under a single activity. If the scope of work defined by an activity may be executed during separate time intervals, then consider splitting the activity into multiple activities.

Summary/Hammock/Level-of-effort (LOE) activities should only be used as summary activities and should not be used to represent work associated with a physical product or deliverable.