Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and Critical Path Method (CPM) methods are well known for project management and are also application for planning and scheduling of activities in WBS. They are tools for planning and scheduling various activities of the software project. WBS spreadsheet of MS-Project provides three important benefits besides planning and controlling of the execution of the project.

•    It provides work-in-progress status at any point of time.
•    It provides a good reference data for estimating the resources, time duration, for planning WBS
     activities for exaction.
•    Over a period, MS-Project builds a data repository in the organization.

The MS-Project planning tool is based on the Gantt chart, where WBS/task/activities are listed on left hand side, and to right its duration of completion is stated. It further helps to plan and schedule the activities on a time scale. It shows the sequence of activities: that is, which activities must precede before others can be executed. It however,  does not show clearly the dependencies and precedence relationship of each activity in WBS. To solve these problems, the tool suggested is PERT/CPM, a network based planning and scheduling tool.

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