Good relationships are the key to success in Microsoft Project, as well as in life. Task links, aka task dependencies or relationships, tell Project how tasks influence one another, which it uses to calculate task start and finish dates. The start and finish dates of the tasks in a project combine to determine the finish date of the entire project, too. This month's column describes the different types of task dependencies and different methods for creating and modifying them.

Although the project management names for tasks in a relationship are successor and predecessor, a link isn't about which task starts first, order or sequence -- it's about control. For example, in a start-to-start dependency, both tasks start at the same time, but the start of the predecessor controls when the successor starts.

Task links come in four flavors:

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