How Lead and Lag helps in Scheduling?

Lead and Lag are two closely related terms which are commonly used in project scheduling and planning. Project Manager, while working on the schedule and activities of its project, has to closely put these two in place. These are the concepts used to derive the relationships among different activities of the project.

Lead denotes acceleration of the following activity or we can say that following activity in full some or partially will start in parallel to first activity. In PMBOK® also lead is described as the amount of time whereby a successor activity can be advanced with respect to a predecessor activity.

Lead always result in saving time as it helps in parallelism. This is what a project manager uses as a tool when s/he gets pressure from management to compress the schedule or complete the work earlier. Lead can be applied to all types of relationships.

Lag denotes the delay of the following activity or we can say that there will always be some idle time which will pass before the following activity can be started. In PMBOK®, lag is described as the amount of time whereby a successor activity is required to be delayed with respect to a predecessor activity.

Lag always result in delay due to which project timelines will be impacted. This is also an important aspect for a Project Manager. There might be situations in the project where delay or gap is mandatory. For Example: in construction projects, Project Manager has to keep in mind how much time plaster will take to dry before starting the painting. Lag can also be for all types of relationships.

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About Sparsh Goyal

A passionate IT professional, Sparsh Goyal boasts of 4.3+ years of experience. He has worked for various projects under AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Spring Boot, Python, Microservices, RESTful, RESTFUL APIs/SOAP, Scripting, Shell and JAVA. He is also working towards gaining proficiency in Oracle Cloud PaaS, DevOps, SaaS and Docker/Kubernetes. His primary and secondary skills validate his relentless pursuits of expanding his horizon and developing more as an IT person. He boasts of the following certifications: *Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer. *AWS Cloud Solutions Architect Associate. *Oracle certified JAVA programmer.

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