Dangling Activities

Dangles are loosely-tied activities in the project schedules which means that they don’t have defined start or end dates.

Project Schedule with Dangle or Dangling activities is not a close diagram and have open loops which make it’s logic incomplete. This happens because of missing clear, legitimate and logical relationships within activities of the project.

Challenges of Dangling activities

• With Dangle activities in the scheduled project, start or end date cannot be clearly identified
• With Dangling activities managing project delays become difficult as identification of these delays are a challenge in the absence of estimated start and end dates
• The dangling activities make the calculation of float/slack become challenging as we cannot identify the early or late start dates of connected activities

Logic Driven project schedules can suffer from two kinds of open-ended or Dangling Logic, which makes the resulting schedule unreliable for dates or float analysis.

Dangling activities not meeting this rule – also known as open-ended activities, “hanging activities”, or simply “hangers” – indicate inadequate schedule logic

Further Readings

1. Project Schedule Management
2. Critical Path Method vs Critical Chain Method
3. Dangling Logic in Project Schedules
4. The Key Issues with Dangling Activities

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