This is a timely discussion as scheduling is the heart of project management. But for reasons that are beyond the scope of this blog, newer software appears to move away from the rigorous scheduling requirements and shifted more toward collaboration and communication. As Lucian Loan correctly noted, scheduling is the centerpiece of project management.
Scheduling is important for these reasons: 1) What is project management without the ability to plan, monitor, and control time? 2) By developing a strong schedule, practitioners should also developed a strong foundation for the pre-requisites including scope, requirements, activities, resources, dependencies, and risk. 3) For the purpose of expectation setting and communication, schedule is paramount.
There’s one advice that I often give to others: time is the only absolute attribute in all of project management. Scope is often fungible. Cost embodies too many considerations; plus, its subject to manipulation (e.g. exchange rate, capital vs. cash flow, etc.). But time is uni-directional. There’s some political trickery such as promising delivery in the “3rd Quarter” versus September 1st, but beyond very minor manipulations, time is absolute. Managing it well requires a good project schedule.
Te Wu’s comments on the below article:
Lucian Loan for Project Accelerator writes: Project scheduling should be considered the central piece of any project management software. Without the possibility to easily schedule all the tasks of a project there would be little expectation regarding the efficiency of controlling complex projects. However, project management planning or scheduling software should simplify a project managers work and not complicate it.
The project schedule
The project schedule is the central part of the project plan and it is used to connect the tasks to be done with the resources that will accomplish them. It consists of a list of deliverables with intended start and finish dates. Deliverables are the lowest level elements in a schedule, which are not further subdivided.
In addition, the schedule provides project teams with a map for project execution and offers a baseline for tracking progress and managing changes. It can be used as a checklist to make sure that all necessary tasks are performed. If a task is on the schedule, the team is committed to doing it. In other words, the project schedule gives the means by which the project manager brings the team and the project under control.
The visual representation of a schedule is a timeline chart. It is created such that it depicts the tasks of the projects, the duration and the sequencing of them, and the major milestones of the project. The Gantt chart is the most popular timeline chart. SNIP, the article continues @ Project Accelerator, click here to continue reading….
