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Intermediate Certificate on pass

Projects: Planning & Gantt

Turn tasks into a defensible schedule: milestones, finish-to-start dependencies with cycle protection, the Gantt timeline, and the automatically computed critical path and baseline variance.

3 lessons 35 min 5-question assessment 75% to pass
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What you’ll learn

  • Create milestones and finish-to-start dependencies safely
  • Read the Gantt timeline, today line, and per-bar dependency counts
  • Interpret the critical path (early/late start, slack) correctly
  • Set a baseline and use variance to spot slippage early

Course content

3 lessons · 35 min of reading
01
Lesson 1 of 3 Reading 9 min

Milestones and dependencies

Milestones mark the moments that matter — a beta, a go-live, a hand-off. Each has a name, a due date, and an open / met / missed status, and they appear both on the project detail and along the Gantt timeline. Milestones do not do work themselves; they are the goalposts you plan tasks toward, and reviewing "met vs missed" over time is a quick health read on a delivery team.

Dependencies express order. AWRA models finish-to-start links — "this task cannot start until that one finishes" — which is the clearest and most common relationship. On a task you add the tasks it is blocked by, and the page shows both a "Blocked by" and a "Blocks" view so the chain is explicit in both directions. A task can be blocked by several others.

The dependency graph is guarded against cycles. If adding a link would create a loop — directly (A depends on B, B depends on A) or transitively (A→B→C→A) — the system rejects it before saving and explains why. This matters because the scheduling maths in the next lesson assumes an acyclic graph; a cycle would make "what must finish first" unanswerable. Trust the guard: if a dependency is refused, you have a loop to rethink, not a bug to work around.

Key takeaways

  • Milestones are dated goalposts with open/met/missed status, shown on the timeline.
  • Dependencies are finish-to-start; a task can be blocked by several others.
  • The task page shows both "Blocked by" and "Blocks".
  • Cycles (direct or transitive) are detected and rejected before saving.
02
Lesson 2 of 3 Reading 10 min

The Gantt timeline and the critical path

The timeline draws each dated task as a bar scaled across the project's date window, with a live "today" line so you instantly see what is late. Tasks without dates simply do not plot — the timeline reflects the schedule you have actually entered. Each bar also shows how many dependencies it carries, so dense, high-risk areas of the plan stand out.

The headline feature is a computed critical path, not decorative bars. AWRA runs the classic critical-path method: it topologically orders the tasks, does a forward pass to find each task's earliest start and finish, a backward pass to find the latest start and finish that still hits the project end, and from those derives slack — how long a task can slip before it moves the finish date. Tasks with zero slack form the critical path and are highlighted in red.

The practical reading: protect the red. A one-day slip on a zero-slack task pushes the whole project a day; a slip on a task with three days of slack may cost nothing. This lets you triage attention honestly instead of treating every late task as equally urgent. If the critical path runs through a single overloaded person, that is a resourcing conversation the chart just made visible.

Key takeaways

  • Bars are scaled across the project window with a today line; undated tasks do not plot.
  • The critical path is computed via forward/backward passes, not drawn by hand.
  • Slack is how long a task can slip without moving the finish; zero-slack tasks are critical.
  • Protect the critical (red) path first — not every late task is equally urgent.
03
Lesson 3 of 3 Reading 7 min

Baselines and variance

A baseline is a snapshot of the plan taken at a point you consider "the agreed plan" — typically at kickoff. Using "Set baseline" captures the current start and due dates of every task. From then on, the timeline can show a ghost bar for the baseline alongside the live bar, and a variance column expressing how many days ahead or behind each task now is.

Variance turns drift from a vague feeling into a number. If tasks are steadily sliding a few days later than baseline, you see it accumulating rather than discovering it at the deadline. Because the baseline is a deliberate snapshot, a later re-plan does not silently rewrite history — you decide when to re-baseline, and the comparison is always against a fixed reference you chose.

A healthy rhythm is: plan, set a baseline, then review the timeline and variance regularly. Combined with the critical path, this is a compact control system — the critical path tells you which slips matter, and variance tells you how far you have drifted from the plan you committed to. For an iteration-based cadence over the same tasks, pair this with the Agile Delivery course.

Key takeaways

  • A baseline snapshots current task start/due dates as the agreed plan.
  • Variance shows ahead/behind days per task against that snapshot.
  • Re-baselining is deliberate — history is not silently rewritten.
  • Critical path (which slips matter) + variance (how far you've drifted) form a control loop.

Finished the material?

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