Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Learn how to proactively manage project schedules. Get project management tips to resolve schedule conflicts, shorten timeframes, and reduce costs.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you need to know
• Showcase of project schedule
• How to use the exercise files

1. Understanding a Project Schedule

• Why do you need a schedule?
• Schedules within the project life cycle
• Develop a schedule management plan

2. Identifying and Organizing Activities

• Determine the level of detail in your schedule
• Identify project activities
• Add milestones to your schedule
• Organize project work

3. Sequencing Activities

• Estimate duration and work
• Methods for estimating activities
• Put activities in order
• Handle lag in dependencies
• Problems with start-to-start dependencies
• Best practices for sequencing activities

4. Assigning Resources to Tasks

• Plan resources at a high level
• Procure resources
• Define resources in your schedule
• Balance resource assignment variables
• Keep an assignment variable fixed
• Assign resources to activities
• Replace generic resources with people
• Working with part-time workers and teams
• Working with remote teams

5. Fine-Tuning Assignments

• What is the critical path?
• Determine the critical path
• Put the critical path to work
• Too many or too few critical tasks
• Lengthen, delay, or split assignments
• Adjust the level of work over time
• Replace overallocated resources

6. Optimizing Schedules

• Include schedule contingency time
• Baseline the schedule

7. Managing Schedules

• Proactively manage a schedule
• Update progress in the schedule
• Find schedule problems
• Fast-track to shorten a schedule
• Pay more to shorten a schedule
• Change the schedule to reduce cost
• Reduce scope
• Improve schedules

Conclusion

• Next steps