Project Schedule Management includes the steps that need to be taken to make sure the project is finished on time. These steps make up Project Schedule Management:
- Plan Schedule Management
- Define Activities
- Sequence Activities
- Estimate Activity Durations
- Develop Schedule
- Control Schedule
Key Concepts For Project Schedule Management
Scheduling a project gives you a detailed plan of how and when the project will deliver the goods, services, and results that were defined in the project scope. It also helps you communicate with stakeholders, keep their expectations in check, and report on the project’s progress.
The project management team chooses a way to make plans, like an agile or critical path technique. Then, information relevant to the project is put into a scheduling tool to make a project schedule model. This information includes the activities, planned dates, durations, resources, dependencies, and constraints. A project plan is what comes out of it.
It’s easy for one person to finish a smaller job in a short amount of time if they define the activities, put them in the right order, guess how long each one will take, and make a schedule model. This page shows these steps as separate parts because they each use different tools and methods.
As much as possible, the detailed project plan should stay flexible throughout the project so that it can be changed to reflect new information, a better understanding of the risks, and activities that add value.
Concepts And New Ways Of Managing Project Schedules
There is a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability in the global market, and it’s hard to see the big picture. Because of this, it’s becoming even more important to have a contextual framework for adopting and changing development practices to meet the changing needs of the environment. It makes a plan, but it knows that once the work starts, goals may change, so the plan needs to adapt to this new information.
The following are some new ways of planning projects, but they’re not the only ones:
Iterative scheduling with a backlog
This is a type of rolling wave planning that is based on flexible life cycles in Project Schedule Management , like the agile way of making products. The needs are written down in user stories, which are then ranked and improved right before building starts. Product features are built during timed work periods. People often use this method to give customers small amounts of extra value or so that different teams can work on a lot of features at the same time that don’t depend on each other. The broad and growing use of adaptive life cycles for product development shows that this scheduling method works for many projects. This method is good because it allows for changes all the way through the growth life cycle.
On-demand scheduling
It is based on the theory-of-constraints and pull-based scheduling ideas from lean production. It limits a team’s work in progress to balance demand with the team’s delivery throughput. On-demand scheduling doesn’t use a plan that was made ahead of time for the growth of the product or product increments. Instead, it pulls work from a backlog or intermediate queue so that it can be done right away as resources become available. People often use on-demand scheduling for projects that change the product little by little in operating or maintenance settings, and where tasks can be grouped by size and scope or made to be similar in size and scope.
Considerations For Agile/Adaptive Environments
Adaptive methods do work in short cycles, look at the results, and make changes as needed. These cycles give quick feedback on the approaches and deliverables that work best. They usually show up as iterative scheduling and on-demand, pull-based scheduling, which we talked about in the part on Key Trends and Emerging Practices in Project Schedule Management.
Some big companies have both small and big projects going on at the same time. To keep track of the growth of these programs over the long term, they need long-term roadmaps that take into account things like team size, geographical spread, regulatory compliance, organizational complexity, and technical complexity. For the whole delivery life cycle of bigger, company-wide systems, it might be necessary to use a mix of methods that use a predictive approach, an adaptive approach, or both. The group might need to mix some actions from different main methods, or choose a method that has already done this, and use some basic ideas and methods from older methods.
The project manager’s job stays the same whether they are in charge of projects using a predictive development life cycle or in settings that can change in Project Schedule Management . The project manager will need to know about the tools and methods and know how to use them correctly in order for adaptive approaches to work.
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