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For every $1 billion invested in projects, $122 million was wasted due to poor project performance, according to the Project Management Institute. Understanding project management basics can help you avoid that level of waste.
One of the key aspects of a project management plan is a project schedule. In this piece, we’ll explore how you can create your own project schedule to help successfully complete your next project.
A project schedule is a formal timetable that enumerates start dates, deadlines, and resources required for a project.
Depending on the complexity of a project, a schedule can be as simple as a checklist of tasks with deadlines or a complex multipage document.
Regardless of the size of the project, creating a schedule is one of the most important project management steps.
Generally, creating a project schedule falls under the responsibilities of a project manager. However, all stakeholders within a project should be involved in the process.
Realistic and detailed project schedules are important because they help keep projects within budget and on schedule. They also avoid miscommunication between stakeholders and eliminate ambiguities across project teams.
Project schedules consist of multiple factors that need to be quantified before the formal schedule is finalized.
Getting each of these factors right helps ensure you’re creating a realistic schedule that will lead to a successful project.
Deliverables are the outputs of a project. Different tasks within your project schedule will produce different outputs as they are completed.
Deliverables can be tangible or intangible. Exactly what a deliverable looks like depends on the stage of the project and the tasks it consists of.
The finished product or service you provide to your client is obviously one of the most important project deliverables. However, well-planned projects often have other deliverables for internal or external stakeholders throughout the course of the project. As you might expect, deliverables for external stakeholders (usually your client) are external deliverables.
Similarly, deliverables for internal stakeholders (usually any stakeholder other than your client, such as employees, contractors, etc.), are internal deliverables.
A few key characteristics of a project deliverable are that:
Examples of external project deliverables include a finished house in a construction project, a wireframe to show your client what a website will look like, or an improved workflow.
Examples of internal project deliverables include meeting minutes, internal project progress reports, or audit reports to ensure quality.
If you’re having a hard time telling internal and external deliverables apart, just remember this: If it goes to the client, it’s an external deliverable.
Deadlines in project scheduling are just what you’d expect: due dates for task and project completion. The concept is simple, but deadlines and timeframes are vitally important to successful projects.
Setting realistic deadlines means finding a balance between budget, available resources, and client expectations.
Of course, this is easier said than done. All too often, despite the best efforts of stakeholders, projects miss their deadlines. This, in turn, hurts customer satisfaction, morale, and budgets.
By creating a well-planned project schedule, you increase the probability that you can set and meet realistic deadlines.
In project management, resources are all of the people, capital, tools, and technology needed to carry out a project and the associated tasks.
While time constraints related to deadlines are an important part of creating a project schedule, it’s crucial not to overlook your resource constraints.
As a project manager, you’ll need to carefully allocate resources to ensure they’re in the right place at the right time. For simple projects, resource management may come down to assigning tasks to a few employees. For complex projects, you may need to coordinate access to facilities and equipment across multiple project teams with varying schedules.
In many cases, projects involve tasks that cannot begin until a prerequisite task is completed. Dependencies define the relationship between different tasks throughout a project.
For example, suppose you’re managing a construction project with the intent to build a house. Before you can install insulation, you need to finish running electrical wiring. Before you run electrical wiring, you must complete the frame and exterior walls of the house.
In this case, the insulation depends on the electrical wiring being installed. Similarly, the wiring depends on the frame and exterior walls being complete.
In project scheduling, milestones indicate when key project objectives have been completed.
Using milestones enables you to track the status of a project at a high level. Sticking with the house example, if the frame should be complete one week in, that could be a project milestone.
If you check in with stakeholders and see the frame is complete in week one, that’s a good sign. Alternatively, if you see that that milestone hasn’t been met, you can investigate and work to get back on track.
Technically, a work breakdown structure (WBS) is a deliverable related to a project. However, it is important enough to call out separately since it’s an important part of a project schedule.
Different estimation techniques, such as PERT, or program evaluation and review technique), can keep your estimates honest.
The Project Management Institute describes a WBS as:
“a deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the project team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables. It organizes and defines the total scope of the project.”
Given that description, you may ask, “What’s the difference between a WBS and a project schedule?”
A WBS focuses on project deliverables and is not concerned with time constraints or dependencies. With the WBS, you can get a clear idea of the work required to produce your project’s outputs. A project schedule brings time and dependencies into the mix and enables you to properly allocate resources and set deadlines.
Now that you understand what a project schedule is and the key components, we can start creating one. Before you dive in, you should already have a clear understanding of the project’s scope and objectives.
To begin, you’ll need to quantify all of the tasks associated with completing your project. At the same time, be sure to detail the associated deliverables and required resources.
Quantifying all of your project’s tasks and deliverables enables you to make accurate estimates going forward.
At this stage, you may need to collaborate with internal project teams to understand the various subtasks required.
You’ll also want to make sure your client has the same external deliverable expectations you do. For complex projects, this stage will include the creation of the WBS.
Now that you know what tasks you need to complete, you can begin to map dependencies. There are a few different types of dependency relationships:
Mapping out the dependencies for all of your tasks is an important prerequisite for realistic scheduling and resource allocation. Collaboration with your internal stakeholders is vital to getting this part of your project schedule right.
Now that you understand the dependencies that exist between tasks, it’s time to estimate how long they will take. Doing so will help you set realistic deadlines and identify the critical path later on. You’ll need input from relevant stakeholders to complete this step.
After you’ve laid out your dependencies, you’ll be able to determine the critical path for your project. In short, the critical path is the set (or sets) of dependent tasks that dictate if your project is completed on time.
Many paths in a project can have some slack built in, meaning that even with some delays, the project can still meet deadlines.
That isn’t the case for the critical path. Unless you can work some magic, a delay in the critical path means a delay in project completion.
At this point, you’ll have a solid foundation for your project schedule. From here, you can take a step back and pick your milestones. It can be easy for project management beginners to trivialize milestones.
After all, if everyone executes as planned, all that matters are the deliverables and deadlines, right? While that makes sense at a high level, as a project manager, you need to make sure everyone is on track to deliver. Milestones help you do that.
Assumptions are often stigmatized as negative. However, in project management, you must make assumptions regularly.
For example, if your procurement team tells you that materials will arrive on February 1, that’s an assumption you’re banking on.
Inherent to any assumption is an amount of risk. For example, say there is a 10% risk those materials don’t show up until February 8. That means there’s a 10% chance that one assumption could delay your project by a week.
When you quantify and document all of your risks and assumptions, you’re able to forecast your project’s overall risk, create contingencies and backup plans, and reduce the impact of one of your assumptions falling through.
Now you should have a firm grasp of the time your project will take as well as the risks and assumptions underlying your estimates. At this point, you can set the deadlines for your project.
Deadlines are a simple enough concept, but getting them right is a challenge. There is constant tension between speed and quality.
As the project manager, it’s your job to create realistic deadlines that balance the demands of different stakeholders.
At this point, your project schedule is effectively complete. This step is where you review your schedule for accuracy and have stakeholders sign off on the schedule’s feasibility.
A few items to check for during the process are:
If your project is complex enough to warrant an in-depth project schedule, using project management software probably makes sense.
Identifying the best project management software begins with understanding the general benefits project management software can afford you. From there, you can select a specific software based on features, your needs, and pricing and then create a plan to implement the software.
To help you get started, let’s take a look at some of the primary benefits of using project management software:
If most of your projects are small in scale, you may wonder if project management software is worth the cost.
After all, you can probably get by without it. It’s true that smaller projects may be manageable through spreadsheets and whiteboards alone, but dedicated software can add value for small teams, too.
If software isn’t in the budget, free versions of TeamGantt or Podio may meet your needs without any licensing costs.
It’s become a cliche, but those who fail to plan are effectively planning to fail.
By developing a detailed project schedule early in the project life cycle and using the right project management tools, you can make your next project a success.
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