Scheduling Best Practice

Monitor and Remedy Dangling Activities

While it is generally considered a best practice to insure that a project CPM schedule has only one start activity (an activity with no predecessors) and one end activity (an activity with no successors) with no other open activities, project schedules are often not evaluated for dangling activities.

Dangling activities plague many schedules, and their presence in an active schedule causes inaccuracies which potentially result in wrong critical paths and incorrect milestone and completion dates.

An activity with dangling start is an activity with at least one predecessor, but none of its predecessor relationships are of the type Finish-to-Start or Start-to-Start.