PERT study guide
PERT · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
PERT - the Program Evaluation and Review Technique - is a project scheduling method rather than a single issuing body's certification. It is taught and assessed inside project management, operations, engineering, and construction curricula, and many employers and training providers offer their own PERT-based exams. This page supports study for PERT-style assessment: the ability to model a project as a network of activities, estimate durations three ways, identify the critical path and float, and translate that network into a defensible probability statement about schedule completion. Candidates are typically coordinators, planners, analysts, or PMP-track practitioners who already know basic scheduling terminology and want the quantitative side. The PERT study guide has 4 sections and about 1,542 words.
01Project Network Modeling and Activity Sequencing
A schedule network converts the activity list and its dependencies into a graph. The dominant convention is activity-on-node (AON) , also called the precedence diagram, where boxes are activities and arrows are precedence links.
347 words, about 2 min02Three-Point Estimating (Optimistic, Most Likely, Pessimistic)
Three-point estimating replaces a single duration with a range: O (optimistic - everything goes right), M (most likely - the mode, the duration you would bet on), and P (pessimistic - a realistic worst case, not a disaster scenario). Two weighted formulas appear on exams: Triangular: TE = (O + M + P) / 3 - equal weights, a simple average.
386 words, about 2 min03Critical Path and Float/Slack Analysis
Every activity carries four dates. The forward pass moves left to right: ES = latest EF among predecessors (plus lag); EF = ES + duration.
427 words, about 2 min04Schedule Probability, Variance, and Risk Interpretation
PERT treats project duration as a random variable, approximately normal, with mean TE (the critical path length built from three-point estimates) and standard deviation σpath = √(sum of variances of activities on the critical path). Then: Z = (T − TE) / σpath where T is the target date.
382 words, about 2 min