Explain the use and advantages of squared networks in Project Management with the help of an example.

Project Management involves defining the tasks to be performed, scheduling the tasks and developing the planning documentation needed to guide the work and the workers. Allocating budget for each task and assigned people to each task are additional planning functions that are not treated in this Project Planning series. I treated assigning people to tasks in the postings on Team Dynamics and I will treat budgeting in a later posting because I believe it’s an important enough cause of project failures to deserve its own article.

A big mistake inexperienced project leaders make is scheduling tasks before the tasks are defined. Inexperienced project leaders try to combine these two planning steps by listing the tasks to be performed and working out a schedule for the list. Defining tasks should be done first, at least for complex projects, because it’s just not obvious how tasks should be sequenced and structured as will be explained below. Defining tasks means defining the inputs, the outputs and the tasks the outputs support. Just having a list of tasks does not mean that the inputs, outputs and the work needed to turn inputs into outputs are understood. It should be obvious that schedules constructed without such understanding are not likely to be executable without numerous corrections.

N-Squared diagrams are a simple but effective way to define tasks, determine the optimum sequencing of tasks and quickly see which tasks can be done in parallel to maximize lead and lag times. A detailed description of how to construct and interpret NSquared diagrams for project tasks is found in my book blog.