[2025] Project Scheduling | Project Management Fundamentals

 Managing project schedules is a lot like making soup. You gather ingredients while figuring out what the project is about. Toss them into a big pot as you build the schedule. Adjust the seasoning to get workloads, dates, and costs right. Then you watch the schedule as it cooks, and make adjustments until the work's completed and the project goal is achieved. The primary reason you build a project schedule is to identify what things have to get done and when. A project schedule also shows how all the pieces of the project fit together. That way the people working on the project see how their work affects others.

Now let's look at the ingredients that go into a project schedule. Tasks are the foundation of a schedule. They represent the work that has to be done to deliver the project's results. So the project isn't done until all its tasks are done. Time Estimates are a big part of the schedule, because they help determine how long tasks should take. As you'll see when we discuss assigning resources to tasks, time estimates and resources go hand in hand. You can fine-tune your initial estimates when you find out what resources you have, to work on your project.

Just about everything on a project runs more smoothly if you start by identifying what work needs to be done and break it down to the right level of detail. For most projects, the best way to identify work is to start at the top with the high level project deliverables and work your way down. First, make a list of the high level deliverables. In our example, the high level deliverables are orientation topic outline, employee handbook, videos, a website and live training.

There are three main ways to organize the tasks in your project. By deliverable, by phase or by group. You can choose one approach or a combination of methods based on how you're going to plan and manage your project. Let's take a look at each of the three main methods. Organizing work by deliverable, lends itself to identifying tasks from the top down. You can organize work by the phase in which it occurs. If your project has distinct phases, such as planning, and developing training.

When you start planning a project, you need to estimate what it's going to take. Estimating can be tough, but there are ways to make it easier. The first step is to get everyone to agree on the level of accuracy for estimates. There are three levels of accuracy to choose from. You can start with a rough estimate, plus or minus 50%, to see if a project makes sense to pursue. As you get additional details, you can put together more accurate estimates. The second level of estimate is the mid-range estimate. These are usually plus or minus 25%.

Putting tasks in order is another big step toward completing your schedule. Once tasks are in the right order, you're on your way to a smoothly running project. Order is important because some tasks have an effect on others. Tasks can relate to each other on several ways based on when they start and finish. These relationships are called task lengths or task dependencies. The first step in identifying a task dependency is to figure out which task is the trigger. The task connected by a dependency are called predecessor and successor tasks. The predecessor task trigger the successor.

Some linked tasks have delays between them, while others overlap. You use Lag Time, positive or negative, to create these delays or overlaps. Positive lag time creates a delay between linked tasks. Waiting for paint to dry before installing carpet is one example of lag time. If you use a scheduling program you can add lag time to any task dependency that needs it. To add a two day lag, all you have to do is fill in two days in the lag field. An Overlap is when two tasks run simultaneously for part of their duration.

Some tasks have restrictions on when they can occur, which are known as schedule or date constraints. These schedule constraints reduce the flexibility of your schedule, so it's important to use them onyl when they're really necessary. Constraints can be flexible or inflexible. Most tasks need to start as soon as possible. That's an example of a Flexible Constraint and it's the one that you will use most often. In this case, the start date is the earliest possible date, based on task dependencies and resource availability.

When you assign resources to tasks, issues like heavy work loads and late finish dates really start come into focus. Fortunately, Resource Assignments are made up of three variables. Duration, work, and rResource availability. You can juggle these to meet schedule objectives or resolve scheduling issues. Duration is the length of a task from its start to its finish. Work, also called effort, represents the persons hours it takes to complete the task.

If your project needs more than a handful of people. A Staffing Plan can help you line up the right folks. To build a staffing plan, you need to know the skills required to perform project tasks. And a high level estimated schedule of when tasks occur. One way to build a staffing plan is in a Spreadsheet. You estimate how long you expect big sections of the project to take, and the skills needed for each of those sections. With this information, start by listing the skills needed in the cells in the first column.

Getting assignments right for part time workers and teams is an important step toward forecasting a schedule with accuracy. Part-time workers take longer to complete work, because they don't work full time. If a task is estimated as one full work day, someone working half time will need two workdays to finish. When you assign a part time worker, the first step is specifying the person's availability. For instance, four hours a day for someone working half-time. The second step is specifying when the part-timer works.

The critical path is a connective sequence of tasks that runs from the start of the project to the finish. That means any changes to dates on the critical path change the project finish date. Before you use the critical path to manage your schedules, you should understand what makes tasks critical. And how to identify them. The tasks on the critical path have one thing in common. They have zero total slack. Total slack, also called flow, is the amount of time that a task can move in the schedule before it affects the project finish date. So zero total slack means that the tasks are hemmed in by their predecessors and successors.

The task on The Critical Path takes longer, or gets delayed. Its late finish date pushes out finish dates of all the other critical tasks, and eventually, the finish date of the project. By managing the tasks on the critical path, you can keep your project on schedule. Because tasks on the critical path directly affect the project finish date, they should be your top priority for keeping on schedule. In other words, if issues arise that threaten to delay both critical and noncritical tasks, tend to the critical task first.

There are three ways to even out the work assigned to someone: lengthening, delaying and splitting assignments. Lengthening the duration of assignments and letting them run simultaneously can be an easy fix when someone is overloaded, because assignments are scheduled at the same time. When you increase the duration of assignments, the person works fewer hours on each assignment each day. In this sample project, the instructional designer has two one-day tasks scheduled at the same time. Review current training methods and review training feedback.

Work contours help you even out people's workloads, while improving your schedule's accuracy. When you first assign people to task, the typical model is the tasks start and stop abruptly. But how much someone works on an assignment can vary day by day. Work contours put this varying work level into your schedule. They do a better job of modeling how people work on their assignments and they don't lengthen the schedule as much as delays or splits do. Work levels can vary in several ways over the duration of an assignment.

Another way to balance workloads is to reassign work to others who have more time available. If you have someone who's over-allocated, and you have someone available with the proper skills, this can be a good way to reduce their workload without lengthening the project. First, look at the people who are over allocated on your project. Then determine whether you can find people with the same skills to take on some of the over allocated assignments. Depending on the constraints on your project or your company, you can consider other employees, contractors or third party vendors. If you find people with the right skills who are available at the right time. Go ahead and start the procurement process as soon as you can. Once you're sure you have the replacements lined up, change your schedule to reassign the over allocated work.

Adding buffers to the schedule can keep the project on time, even if issues come up, without having to jump through hoops. When you add buffers, it's a good idea to assign them for specific reasons. For example, to educate project staff, or for the complexity of the recording studio setup. That way you communicate your reasoning to management, and assure them that you aren't just adding blank space to the schedule. At first, you can guesstimate the size of the buffers you add.

After the stakeholders approve the project plan, it's important to save that plan. That version of the project plan is called the baseline. That's because it's the measuring stick you use once work begins to compare actual progress to what you planned. Whatever you include in the baseline should go into your change control process, then when you make changes to the baseline, they're recorded as change requests.

Managing a project schedule means balancing scope, time, cost, resources and quality. The changes you make to the schedule depend on which factors are important to the stakeholders. Because schedule changes can introduce risk, you also have to consider the level of risk stakeholders are willing to accept. Time is often a big one, because the stakeholders have a project finish date in mind. Once work starts, part of your job is to watch for schedule problems brewing. If delays begin to threaten the finish date, you can use techniques like fast tracking and crashing tasks to shorten the remaining schedule. If money is more important than time, there are a few ways to change the schedule to reduce costs.

After your team members start working on their tasks, it's time to start managing the schedule. Because projects never go completely according to plan, you need to watch for schedule problems in the making. That way you can do something about them before they get out of hand. First, look for tasks whose start dates are later than you originally planned. Or have already started late. Here you can see the gray task bars are where everything should have been, and the red and blue task bars are where everything is now. If a task doesn't start when it's supposed to, there's a good chance it won't finish when it's supposed to either.