The Key to Projects: Schedule Management

Luc Nguyen

Oct 3, 2023

4 min read

Being a project manager can be difficult at times. You are tasked to look over the development team while cater towards the needs of clients and stakeholders. While this is happening, you also need to make sure proper communication is established between the two and simultaneously making both parties happy and motivated. Want to make your life easier? Look into project schedule management, a better and efficient way of looking over things. By implementing schedule management, you'll be able to have a better grasp on the project as a whole.

What Is Project Schedule Management?

Before we can dive in, we need to understand what project schedule management is. The best way to describe it is a procedure to define project tasks required to ensure the completion of the project on time. There are six main components to consider when implementing project schedule management:

Planning Process

With any blueprint or project, you need to consider planning. Planning can dictate the life of the project, being able to foresee what will happen throughout the process. This can include details, start and end dates, criteria and objectives met. It caters to the needs of the project, in the sense it can be detailed and formal or broad depending on the scope of the project.

Defining Activities

Although this step can be considered within the planning stages, you may need to go more into detail. You need to identify specific activities and actions that will be preformed during the life of the project. Implement an activity list, which is a list of activities to be included on a project schedule. This would contain basic information such as the activity name, a unique identifier and a explanation for the activity. It would be wise for the activity list to go hand-in-hand with the WBS. As you complete activities, you can set in milestones to track progress and work done. The goal of this component is to ensure the development team understands what work must be done in order for it to be scheduled.

Sequencing Activities

Ensure that you are able to identify dependencies within your project. Dependencies are essentially the linearization of tasks that should be completed in order? Can you start on one part before the other? Do you have to work on everything one at a time or at the same time? There are the questions you should be asking yourself when creating a schedule. There are different types of dependencies that can be implemented when you are sequencing your activities. Mandatory dependencies refer to hard logic that makes sense to preform, such as writing code before you can test it. Discretionary dependencies refer to the soft logic, like soft rules you can implement on the team that aren't as harsh as mandatory dependencies. External dependencies talk about the relationships between the project itself and non-project aspects. Look at it as "outside factors" to consider. Lastly, internal dependencies describe procedures done within the project team that they have control over.

Estimating Activity Durations

Time can be a very important factor, especially for clients and stakeholders. You have to ensure the project follows the schedule and any important deadlines implemented. Duration, how long something takes, is something that should always be calculated. You can't promise stakeholders that your project can be completed within one month if you know the work will take about two or three. By estimating durations, you can account for anything that could affect the timeline of the project. It's always better to be early rather than late, so make sure you give good estimations.

Developing the Schedule Itself

After doing all of your calculations and planning out, it is time to actually create the schedule itself. It's also okay to go through several different versions of the schedule to ensure everyone can follow one final one. You can use something like a Gantt chart to display a project schedule.

*Example of a Gantt Chart for a Project, showing tasks and their duration

Using something like a Gantt chart as listed above can allow you to see the whole "big picture" of the project. You can also add milestones to your Gantt chart to put more emphasis on important events.. Or if you like something more specific, you could implement critical path analysis.

*Example of a Critical Path Analysis for making an omelet

Critical path analysis can help you view which tasks are critical. It can lay out the sequencing and dependencies within your project to ensure your team will take the necessary steps to complete all of them.

Controlling the Schedule

Although you just created a schedule with important sequencing and deadlines, many outside factors can happen. Making sure you have schedule control will ensure that you can see the "progression bar" of your project to see if anything needs to be adjusted. Life can happen that will affect the development team or clients that may require you to tweak the schedule. By having full control of the schedule, you can change it so that the project can still be completed on schedule with any changes implemented.

Tips to Keep in Mind

After going through the implementation of project schedule management, now you know the benefits that it can bring to the table. It allows your project to be more organized and allows individuals to be more informed on what's going on. On top of this, you can also make your project more successful by adding these tips on top of project schedule management.

Hear From Your Stakeholder/Clients

As a project manager, you want to cater to your clients and stakeholders. That's why you make sure to establish good communication between you, them and the development team. You can always make things easier by listening from your clients. Everyone can have different expertise and resources to provide. Ask for input from your clients to make sure the project is following all the criteria.

Use Previous Projects

Let's face it, there can be many knockoffs that follow the same concepts from previously successful projects. However, instead of stealing the concept, you can look at the circumstances as reference when developing your project. It can help you be more realist and ensure you are sequencing things correctly and efficiently.

Identify Risk

When the time comes, you may need to implement last minute changes. However, you need to be aware of anything risk that come with those changes. Maybe you identified a method or task that could risk the succession of the project. Without identifying the risk, you may put your project at jeopardy.