Schedule

In project management, a schedule consists of a list of a project's terminal elements with intended start and finish dates. Terminal elements are the lowest element in a schedule, which is not further subdivided. Those items are often estimated in terms of resource requirements, budget and duration, linked by dependencies and scheduled.

Overview

Before a project schedule can be created, a project manager should typically have a work breakdown structure (WBS), an effort estimate for each task, and a resource list with availability for each resource. If these are not yet available, it may be possible to create something that looks like a schedule, but it will essentially be a work of fiction. They can be created using a consensus-driven estimation method like Wideband Delphi. The reason for this is that a schedule itself is an estimate: each date in the schedule is estimated, and if those dates do not have the buy-in of the people who are going to do the work, the schedule will be inaccurate.

In many industries, such as engineering and construction, the development and maintenance of the project schedule is the responsibility of a full time scheduler or team of schedulers, depending on the size of the project. And though the techniques of scheduling are well developed, they are inconsistently applied throughout industry. Standardization and promotion of scheduling best practices are being pursued by the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE), the Project Management Institute (PMI). In some large corporations, scheduling, as well as cost, estimating, and risk management are organized under the department of project controls.^{[citation needed]}

Many project scheduling software products exist which can do much of the tedious work of calculating the schedule automatically, and plenty of books and tutorials dedicated to teaching people how to use them. However, before a project manager can use these tools, he or she should understand the concepts behind the WBS, dependencies, resource allocation, critical paths, Gantt charts and earned value. These are the real keys to planning a successful project.^{[citation needed]}

In order for a project schedule to be healthy, the following criteria must be met^[1]:

• The schedule must be constantly (weekly works best) updated.
• The EAC value must be equal to the baseline value.
• The remaining effort must be appropriately distributed among team members, taking into consideration vacations.

See also

• List of project management software

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)

Further reading

• Project Management Institute (2003). A Guide to The Project Management Body of Knowledge (3rd ed.). Project Management Institute. ISBN 1-930699-45-X. 
• Ted Klastorin (2003). Project Management: Tools and Trade-offs (3rd ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0471413844. 
• Heerkens, Gary (2001). Project Management (The Briefcase Book Series). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-137952-5. 
• Kerzner, Harold (2003). Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling (8th ed.). Wiley. ISBN 0-471-22577-0. 
• Chamoun, Yamal (2006). Professional Project Management, The Guide (1st ed.). Monterrey, NL MEXICO: McGraw Hill. ISBN 970-10-5922-0. 
• Lewis, James (2002). Fundamentals of Project Management (2nd ed.). American Management Association. ISBN 0-8144-7132-3. 
• Meredith, Jack R. and Mantel, Samuel J. (2002). Project Management : A Managerial Approach (5th ed.). Wiley. ISBN 0-471-07323-7. 
• Lev Virine & Michael Trumper (2007). Project Decisions: The Art and Science. Management Concepts. ISBN 978-1567262179. 
• Murray B. Woolf, PMP (2007). FASTER Construction Projects with CPM Scheduling (1st ed.). McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-148660-0. 

External links

• How to Defend an Unpopular Schedule (IEEE Software, Vol. 13, No. 3, May 1996)