Activity Names
A consistent convention for naming work activities should be established early in a program and carried through its completion. Names for all activities, including summary, milestone, and detailed activities, should be unique and as descriptive as necessary to facilitate communication between all team members. Descriptive activity names ensure that decision makers, managers, activity managers, task workers, and auditors know what scope of work is required for each activity.
Because activities are essentially instructions for someone to carry out, activity names should be phrased in the present tense with verb-noun combinations, such as “review basis of estimate,” “test level 4 equipment,” or “install and test workstations, room 714.” Milestone descriptive names should be related to an event or a deliverable, such as “Milestone B decision” or “level 4 test results report delivered.” In all cases, descriptive names should be unambiguous and should identify their associated product without the need to review high-level summary activity or preceding activity names. In the example in figure 6, it is not clear which products the detailed inspection activities are associated with if their respective summary activities and preceding activities are not included in the filtered view.
Figure 6: Redundant Activity Names
Repetitive naming of activities that are not associated with specific products or phases makes communication difficult between teams, particularly between team members responsible for updating and integrating multiple schedules. However, in figure 7, activity names include their respective products, which are also identified for clarity in their summary activity.
Figure 7: Unique Activity Names
Individual activities in figure 7 are easier to identify, especially when filters and other analyses are performed on the schedule data and the activities are taken out of the summary-indented activity context. For example, filtering the schedule data to display only critical path activities will not be helpful if activity names are redundant or incompletely identify the work being executed. Communicating to management that “inspection” is a critical path activity is not useful unless management knows which inspection is meant. Communicating that “drywall screw inspection” is a critical path activity conveys usable information and obviates the need to note the summary or predecessor activity. Unique activity names are essential if a schedule is to produce reliable information at the summary, intermediate, and detailed levels.
Finally, abbreviations specific to programs and agencies should be minimal and, if used, should be defined in either the WBS dictionary or the schedule basis document.9
A schedule basis document and its recommended content are detailed in Best Practice 10.↩︎