First, I broke the project up into large tasks, which were similar to the items specified in the assignment.  The only difference was that I pulled the reconciling task out of the problem decomposition group and made it a separate task.

Second, I broke the large tasks up into finer-grained subtasks, and redid the dependencies to reflect that.  For instance, the FP analysis initially depended on xyz, but did not really need the pqr to be done first.

I then assigned a difficulty rating from 1 to 3 to each subtask, and put the whole thing into MS Project, with each difficulty point mapping approximately to one day of schedule time.

--Max Bandazian