I like the article and agree with your suggestions. I help people get to grips with Microsoft Project and explaining the concept of the Critical Path calculation is always fun, especially when you explain that the good news is that the tool does all the number crunching but that it is useful to understand the concept.

I suggest to my “victims” that a good schedule should have a series of Top Level Summary Tasks and Milestones to conclude each section/stage/phase of the project. I advise against linking tasks because you can but then state that in my mind every single TASK with 2 exceptions should have @ least 1 predecessor and 1 successor, most people “get” what the exceptions are. I then suggest creating a custom combination view, I call it the LOGIC View (Gantt Chart on top,Relationship Diagram on the bottom) to help people “cycle” their way through the schedule - this approach can eliminate what I call “loose end” or “orphan” tasks and will result in their Total Slack being significantly reduced, again most people get this in terms of getting tasks done sooner rather than later. It also fits in with the notion of managing stage boundaries which is a PRINCE2 concept that is actually a good practical idea.