Plan Schedule Management is the process of making the rules, guidelines, and records needed to plan, create, manage, carry out, and keep track of the project schedule. The most important benefit of this process is that it tells you how to handle the project schedule during the whole thing. This step is either done only once or at set times during the job. Figure below shows the process’s sources, how it works, and what it produces.
Plan Schedule Management: Inputs
Project Charter
There is a summary milestone plan in the project charter that will help with managing the project schedule.
Project Management Plan
The following are some of the parts of a project management plan:
- The schedule will be made possible by the information in the scope management plan, which explains how the scope will be defined and built.
- The method for developing the product will help figure out the way to plan, how to estimate, what tools to use for scheduling, and how to keep the schedule under control.
Enterprise Environmental Factors
Organizational mindset and structure, Team resource availability and skills, and physical resource availability are some of the business environment factors that can affect the Plan Schedule Management process. Software for planning, There are also commercial databases, like standardized estimating data, and guidelines and criteria for changing the organization’s normal processes and procedures to fit the needs of the project.
Organizational Process Assets
Some organizational process assets that can affect the Plan Schedule Management process are, but aren’t limited to: archives of past information and lessons learned; formal and informal policies, procedures, and guidelines for schedule creation, management, and control; template and form files; and Monitors and tools for reporting.
Plan Schedule Management: Tools And Techniques
Expert Judgment
You should think about getting help from people or groups who have specialized knowledge or training from working on similar projects in the past: Schedule creation, management, and control; Scheduling methods (like predictive or adaptive life cycle); Scheduling software; and The project’s business.
Data Analysis
If you want to use a data analysis method for this task, you can, for example, use options analysis. Finding the best schedule method or ways to mix different methods on a project can be part of an alternatives analysis. It can also mean figuring out how thorough the schedule needs to be, how long waves should be for rolling wave planning, and how often it needs to be looked over and changed. It’s important to find the right balance between how detailed the schedule needs to be and how long it takes to keep it up to date for each job.
Meetings
To make the schedule management plan, project teams may get together for planning talks. The project manager, the project sponsor, some project team members, some clients, anyone in charge of planning or carrying out the schedule, and others as needed may all be present at these meetings.
Plan Schedule Management: Outputs
Schedule Management Plan
The project management plan includes a schedule management plan that lays out the steps and standards for creating, tracking, and managing the schedule. Depending on the goals of the project, the schedule management plan can be formal or informal, very detailed or general, and it should include the right levels of control.
The schedule management plan can establish the following:
Project schedule model development
It is explained how the project plan model will be made and what scheduling method and tool will be used.
Release and iteration length
When you use an adaptive life cycle, you set the times for releases, waves, and iterations. When the team is time-boxed, they work steadily toward a goal during those times. Limiting time helps keep the project from becoming too big because it causes teams to work on the most important features first, then add other features as time allows.
Level of accuracy.
The level of accuracy sets the acceptable range for estimating how long an action will really take, and it may also include a buffer amount.
Units of measure
Each resource has a clear explanation of each unit of measurement, like staff hours, staff days, or weeks for time, or meters, liters, tons, kilometers, or cubic yards for amount.
Organizational procedures links
The work breakdown structure (WBS) is the plan for managing the schedule, and it makes sure that the estimates and schedules are consistent.
Project schedule model maintenance
A plan is made for how to keep the schedule model up to date with the project’s state and progress while the project is being carried out.
Control thresholds
You can set variance thresholds to see how well the plan is working. These thresholds show how much variation is okay before you need to do something. The most common way to talk about thresholds is as percentage changes from the parameters set in the basic plan.
Rules of performance measurement
There are rules for earned value management (EVM) or other types of physical performance tracking. As an example, the plan for managing the program might say:
- Guidelines for calculating the percent complete
- To implement EVM techniques (such as baselines, defined formulas, percent complete, etc.).
- Utilizing schedule performance metrics to determine the extent of deviation from the initial schedule baseline, including schedule variance (SV) and schedule performance index (SPI).
Reporting formats
It’s clear what forms and how often to send the different schedule reports.
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