From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Schedules within the project life cycle - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Schedules within the project life cycle

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- [Instructor] Managing a project schedule isn't a once and done deal. It's something you work on throughout most of the project. In PMI's Project Management Book of Knowledge, called PMBOK short, schedule related work is part of the project schedule management knowledge area. That's in the PMBOK sixth edition. In the fifth edition, it was called time management. Let's walk through the life cycle of a project management schedule. First you plan how you're going to schedule the project. For example, what scheduling tool will you use? Are you going to measure progress in hours, days or weeks? Depending on your project, this plan can be formal and detailed, informal and high-level, or somewhere in between. Next you define project activities, also called tasks. Activities represent the work that has to be done to deliver the project's results. This activity definition starts when you define your project scope. Part of the scope is a work breakdown structure or WBS. The lowest levels in the WBS are work packages that produce project deliverables. You break down each work package into activities that spell out what has to be done to produce the corresponding deliverable. We'll explore building a WBS in detail later in the course. Defining activities makes it easy to estimate, schedule and manage work. Once you identify activities, it's time to put them into sequence. The sequence is based on the relationships or dependencies between activities. For example, activity A has to finish before activity B can start. When you've defined all the relationships between activities, you have a logical sequence of the order in which project work should occur. Next, you have to estimate the resources you need to perform each activity. You identify the types of resources needed, including people, equipment, and materials, and estimate the quantities for each. These resource estimates help you figure out how long activities will take and how much they'll cost. You can develop a schedule using several techniques, critical path method, critical chain method, Scrum, Kanban, and so on. Whichever technique you choose, the end result is a that reflects when activities should occur. It usually takes several iterations to develop a realistic schedule. Eventually you'll produce the baseline schedule for your project. That is the approved schedule that represents your target for delivery. Throughout planning, you learn more about the project, like the resources you can get or deadlines that the initial schedule doesn't meet. That's why you fine tune the schedule again and again. Be sure to update your risk management plan as you build, fine tune and manage your schedule. Schedule changes like shortening a schedule to meet deadlines and bringing in additional and unfamiliar resources can introduce risk. Once work begins on your project, you monitor progress to see what's happening in your project and compare that to your baseline schedule. If things aren't proceeding as they should, you take corrective action to bring the schedule back on track. When the project is finished, you compare your original schedule to what actually transpired. That way you can improve your estimates and schedules for future projects. Remember, managing a project schedule isn't a once and done deal, it's something you work on throughout most of the project.

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