Happy’s Essential Skills: Project/Program Management

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Figure 4: a) Simple circle and arrow diagram of activities/events; b) Circle and arrow diagram showing two activities that cannot be started until the first activity has been completed.

In this example, the activities of 'Select Hardware' and 'Core Module Analysis' cannot be started until 'High Level Analysis' has been completed. This diagram also brings out a number of other important points:

• Within Critical Path Analysis, we refer to activities by the numbers in the circles at each end. For example, the task 'Core Module Analysis' would be called activity 2 to 3. 'Select Hardware' would be activity 2 to 9.
• Activities are not drawn to scale. In the diagram above, activities are one week, two weeks, and one day. Arrows in this case are all the same length.
• In the example above, you can see a second number in the top, right hand quadrant of each circle. This shows the earliest start time for the following activity. It is conventional to start at 0. Here units are whole weeks.

A different case is shown in Figure 5. Here, activity 6 to 7 cannot start until the other four activities (11 to 6, 5 to 6, 4 to 6, and 8 to 6) have been completed.

Figure 5: Example of a Critical Path Analysis for computer project.

Affinity Diagram

The Affinity Diagram is a good way to make sure you have discovered all the tasks, activities and events. The Affinity Diagram can be seen in Figures 1, 2 and 3 of my column on the Figure of Merit (FOM) process.

The process to create an Affinity Diagram follows Steps 1 through 6 in the FOM process.

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