Practical Tips for Effective Schedule Management

WARM UP:

• Don’t start schedule creation before you understand the scope of the project. It is key to understand the overall goal of the project; and for this it is important to understand the overall product or service; then drill down to the goal of the project and finally to the scope of the project.
• From the scope comes the WBS. So, having done the homework saves a lot of time and energy in breaking the WBS into activities.
• Engage the stakeholders and ensure a sense of ownership for plans. Never lose sight of the fact that you are managing people more than specific projects.
• Log all assumptions. Also, you should make sure that you have assessed all risks and factor them while developing the overall schedule.

• From the scope, include ALL deliverables. If there are any submittals, ensure they are part of the activities…. these can be a bear! They need to be tracked very well in both the schedule and also in some other system (e.g., spreadsheet, etc).
• Get the best duration estimates you can, based on optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic. Then find out why there is a difference between most likely and pessimistic. What problems are they anticipating? Add those to the rest of your identified risks and perform a good risk analysis process. Add an appropriate contingency of time to your schedule estimate to establish the schedule baseline. Otherwise, it is not realistic.
• Always buffer your deadlines at every stage to under promise and over deliver. Learn from your own AND others mistakes.
• Avoid hard dates. In most of the scheduling techniques, the instructors emphasize that the only hard date should be the start date of the project. The rest should flow through dependencies. So, use constraints sparingly and only to reflect TRUE constraints

ESTIMATING RESOURCE DURATIONS:

• Make sure you assign responsibility to a single person at every point of the projects progress. The worst thing during execution is when no one takes responsibility for a set of activities.
• How much of each resource can be allocated to the project. If your company enters time in time tracker, you can do an analysis. In a particular organization, for example, people work max. 70% on projects (rest is support and administrative), so make sure you put this % for each resource in the resources sheet (if you use MS Project) and make sure you don’t assign resources to more than this.
  Put time off in the calendar. Add Holidays to the global calendar, and then each person’s vacation.
• Any standards in terms of plans should be considered and incorporated into the project schedule, ensuring consistency across plans. For example, the use of the same project calendar is vital.
• Assign lower allocation for the best resource on the project. Chances are they will be pulled into other activities or projects, and this way you reduce the risk.
• Does the team work for 7, 7.5 or 8 hrs/ day? This is important, especially on a long project, so make sure you configure your project file right at the beginning.

• Before baselining the schedule, ensure you iterate over the plan for any missed item/ points. Ponder over the points below before you baseline and submit the schedule for tracking the project.
• Tasks with an estimate of more than 80 hrs should be broken down until you get to 8 hrs or less. From my experience, you lose control over progress if task is too big. Normal thumb rule adopted is the 8:80 rule. Task should not be less than 8 hours or more than 80 hours
• Take into account time for customer feedback and revisions that are needed.
• Be realistic about deadlines.
• Coming back to WBS – The WBS establishes a way to separate the job down into discrete scopes of work to collect both cost and schedule information to be able to establish performance. While that may sound like too much work and a bit much for this job, it is the right way to be moving towards.
• The most important one: Identifying and concentrating on the “critical path” activity is crucial. If that one is not taken care of, the rest of the schedule in other less critical paths get negatively affected.
• Finally, make sure that you capture any assumptions that you’ve made in building the schedule so that you can refer to these at a later time. Best to keep these within an assumptions log, in much the same way as you would capture your risks.

• Are tasks defined as actions (Write Report; Install Widget; etc).
• When linking tasks, ask yourself, “In order to do X, what must we have completed before we start.” These are your predecessors.
• Are all tasks linked to the goal (predecessor / successor relationships)? If not, then there is missing logic.
• Assign a responsible role (or person) to each task: who is responsible for ensuring the task is done? May not be the specific person doing the work.
• You can also prefer the Critical Chain Project Management perspective where execution is geared toward single-tasking and people are encouraged to finish as quickly their task as possible (not on a date). And there are strategic buffers placed to protect the overall project.

• How often should the schedule be updated? General Rule … Don’t allow more than 5% of the schedule pass without an update. Less time is even better, say 2.5% or less. So, if it is 12 months – times .05 (5%) = 0.6 months or about every 2 weeks.
  Remember the following:
• Remember that you are scheduling people, not projects – People have a way of making the neatest schedules into an untidy mess. Prepare for this even if it means scattering fake tasks at intervals in the schedule so that you have unused time which can be applied to the slow bits, and help you keep the promised delivery date.
• Remember that you are scheduling people, not projects – And plan to review and adjust the schedule regularly to account for all the people issues that will arise.
• Again, remember that you are scheduling people, not projects – So do communicate regularly with the people whose work you have scheduled and do communicate to them honestly about the true urgency of their scheduled tasks. Some people will do all they can to help you. Others will delight in making your project fail. You need to know who you are working with.