A guide to Creating a quality Project Schedule

Successful projects start with a good quality project schedule. Creating a schedule is one of the first tasks you should does when given a project to manage. There is often a temptation-get on with the work and worry about the schedule later, but this is a mistake. You'll be the left exposed and if challenged, and would have no evidence of whether your project was on time or running late.

This article looks in a simple, practical approach to creating project schedules. After the reading this article, you'll have a sound approach to creating schedules so you can use for the future projects.

1. Plan with the Team

Team planning is more effective than planning on your own, and ensures everyone have a stake in the schedule and ownership of the outcome. The project team must account is the phases, milestones and tasks so the project can reach a successful conclusion.

I like to create a basic high-level schedule to kick things off. Even if it ' s wrong, it helps the session start moving. It ' s better than sitting in a meeting with your team staring at a blank sheet of paper.

2. Cover the Project Scope

Use the scope statement from your Charter to make sure you include everything the customer expects your to deliver. List all the activities needed to deliver the scope.

Look at the order of activities; Often it's best-start with the most difficult tasks. The type of project may dictate the order, clearly, you can ' t build a house until the foundations has been laid. Think about the work of you can does in parallel and what are dependant on other activities being finished first. Make sure your include the dependencies in your schedule.

3. Group the Tasks into phases

Projects typically go through phases, starting with a idea all the "the" and launch. You should arrange your project schedule in these phases. This is a example I ' ve used for software development projects:

1. Ideas (the first concept, creating the team and everything needed to get the project started).
2. Feasibility (often development of a prototype, model or proof of concept).
3. Build (doing the work to create the product or service).
4. Launch (Preparing to go-live with the product or service, often as a pilot first).
5. Rollout (delivering the product or service to the wider audience following updates from the pilot).
6. Closure (finishing the project, disbanding the project team and tying up any loose ends).

4. Create Milestones

Adding milestones to your schedule helps the project team stay focussed and motivated. Milestones is the end of certain phases, the point where work needs completing, or Sign-off obtained for work carried out . These milestones is how the team sees and measures their progress. Poring over hundreds of the tasks week is daunting. The milestones help put the entire project into perspective and keep everyone on track to a successful finish.

5. Make time for TIME

When adding time estimates (hours or days) against tasks and activities it's best to use people ' s experience. Better still if you can use a database of production rates to give more accurate estimates.

Estimating as a team is effective, because it gives the opportunity for team members to challenge estimates. If an estimate was given by one team member, another may challenge it because he or she had direct experience of similar Wo Rk.

Make sure everyone agrees with the estimates and signs off during the session. This is there is no arguments later.

6. Plan Your People

Now you have your schedule, it's time to add your people, either existing or new team members. Try to match your people's skill-set to the work. Have they do similar work in the past? Do they has a skill that would is useful on a particular aspect of the project? Has they shown an interest in working on a certain area?

A common mistake when the new to project scheduling are to use people for 100% of their time. It's best to assume people would is productive on the project for 80% of their time. Administration, filling out time sheets, team meetings, support and all unrelated tasks take up the remaining 20%.

Once you has assigned people to the tasks in your schedule, review it for conflicts. Has you got areas where people is working on the work streams simultaneously? Is the work allocated evenly across the team? Be careful not to overload your key people, while under-utilising others.

Finally ...

Check your schedule thoroughly to make sure there is no errors. Here is a few common problems found in schedules:

• not including public holidays in the schedule.
• not including team member's holidays in the schedule.
• Missing links to dependencies.
• Creating one continuous block of work with no milestone deliverables along the.
• Using Poor task estimates or guesses instead of people ' s experience or production rates.
• starting with an end date and making the schedule fit it.
• assigning people for 100% of their time.
• dividing tasks between more than one person.
• not building in contingency time in the event things go wrong.

Remember to regularly update the schedule with your team to check for progress and make adjustments where necessary. A daily minute ' Scrum ' style meeting or phone call is useful, where each team member says what he or she did yesterday; What is they intend to does today and highlights any blockers holding them back. It is your responsibility as project Manager to help remove any blockers and smooth the path ahead.

In Summary ...

1. Define the tasks and activities using your scope statement.
2. Sequence The activities identifying any dependencies.
3. Group the tasks and activities into phases.
4. Create milestones.
5. Create time estimates for the tasks and activities.
6. Assign people to the tasks and activities.
7. Review your schedule for errors and correct.
8. Hold daily progress meetings with your team and adjust the schedule.

A quality project schedule is the basis of project success, so spend time with your team creating a schedule it is both Meaningful and realistic.

A guide to Creating a quality Project Schedule