A project manager has laid out a network diagram and is beginning to schedule activities for an upcoming project. Which of the following activities should be performed LAST?

Start and finish dates are calculated after dependencies and durations are established, so they come before the critical path is determined, not last.

Determining the critical path is the final scheduling step because it requires knowing all activity dependencies, individual task durations, and calculated start and finish dates first. Only once the full network is populated with durations and dates can the longest path through the project be identified.

Dependencies must be identified first to build the network diagram structure; they are the earliest step in the scheduling sequence.

Task durations are estimated after dependencies are known but before dates or the critical path can be calculated.