Exercise – Get students to identify major projects that have failed and have been described in the press. Get them to identify what aspects of project management appear to have gone wrong.

Teaching hint – Explaining the basic idea behind network planning is often the biggest hurdle for students. It is one of those ideas that, when they understand it, is perfectly straightforward and clear. However, until that point arrives they can be very confused. We use a simple example to introduce the idea of a network model. The details of the project in the example are not particularly important, but just understanding the three basic pieces of information for any network diagram is important. These three basic pieces of information are:

• the activities which the project consists of;

• the time estimate for each of these activities;

• the relationship between the activities (usually best illustrated by the idea of the immediate predecessor).