Register now or log in to join your professional community.
When you begin the project, you put up the sequence of work as one ends and the next starts. This may not be true practically as you may start the successor activity once some amount of predecessor is done. So, you can't actually call it an advisable relation.
It is common relation and close actual sequence of works in all projects.
It mainly depends on nature of activities invovlved in the project. if activities are going to start parallel nature then this relation can never be advisable. Such activities can linked by start to start and finish to finish relation with required lag to avoid open ends.
This relationship is the default relationship in the P6. It is a realtionship in which Successor starts when the predecessor ends. We can also say that when presedcessor will finish, the successor will start the next planning unit. The planning unit is defined as per user preferences and it is usually hour, day, week or month
The underlying assumption is that you can not start the new or next activity unless the previous activity is finished. For example, you can not start laying the concrete for ceiling unless the four columns or four side walls are complete for the building. Therefore FINISH to START makes sense in thi case. However once the ground preparation is complete, you can start the construction work for all four columns (or all four side walls) simultanesously. Hence the activity of Construction of all four columns will have the relationship of START to START.
Therefore moral of the story is: There is NO DEFAULT relationship between activities. Hence it is always advisible for any shceduler or planner to work with SME (Subject Matter Expert) and Project Manager to understand the relationship bewteen activties.
Some other useful tips are:
1. Understand how your BOM code for project costing are generated.
2. What are your key project deliverables and their relationship to each other - i.e. their delivery order/ precedence/ dependence etc.
Finish to start is most advisable relationship because of following reasons :
1. It avoids the risk of open ends in schedule.
2. Easy to find the driving path easily from finishing stage to starting stage of a project schedule.