June 2010 Issue: Project Scheduling

Welcome to Our June Issue

This month we’re taking a look at Project Scheduling. Significant time and effort are spent in developing the project schedule, often with the help of the project team members and key stakeholders. Once a baseline has been established, the work doesn’t stop there. A sharp eye needs to be kept on deadlines and milestones, ensuring that the project is keeping to the schedule. If it’s not, the project manager needs to find out why and take action to get things back on track.

Included in this issue:

• Free Webinar: Best Practices in Scheduling Using Microsoft Project
• Keeping Up with the Project Schedule
• Project Management Q&A
• Schedule Details: How Low Should You Go?
• Picturing the Project Schedule
• Changing the Culture of Missed Deadlines
• The Benefits of Critical Path Analysis
• Reading Room: Scheduling
• Questions to Ask About Resource Allocation

Next Month’s Topic: Stakeholder Management

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pmPractitioner is published as a service to the project management community. Each issue provides practical project management solutions and tips adapted from a variety of business publications and resources.

Free Webinar: Best Practices in Scheduling Using Microsoft Project

On June 22 at 1-2pm Eastern, AfR/mScholar will be offering a free 1-hour webinar focusing on best practices in project scheduling and how they tie into Microsoft Project. Many organizations use Microsoft Project to schedule their in-house projects but don’t always provide training for either the software or the project scheduling process.

Our instructor, Jim Stewart, PMP, will be discussing some scheduling best practices that should be used in order to maximize efficiency when planning, monitoring and controlling your projects. He’ll then correlate those practices with functions in Microsoft Project to help you better understand the software, even without formal training. Topics covered will include critical path, lead and lag, constraints and deadlines, work breakdown structure, schedule dependencies, schedule baseline and more.

Participants will receive 1 PDU/contact hour for attending this webinar, so pass the word along to fellow project managers and project team members looking for a deeper understanding of the project scheduling process and how it relates to MS Project.

REGISTER HERE

From Action for Results, Inc.

Keeping Up with the Project Schedule

Almost every project will fall behind schedule from time to time, but to avoid getting into serious difficulties, be sure to get regular schedule updates from your project team. Although gathering the data about individual activities can be tedious, it will be far worse if you are caught unawares that the project schedule has deteriorated beyond an easy fix. 

It helps to have a clearly defined process for getting the updated data from the people doing the work on the project. Be sure to set up a policy and procedure for how the team should perform this task if you don’t have a standard already in place in your organization.

If you are using a scheduling tool, review the manuals or ask an expert on the tool about using automated update gathering features. These features allow the project manager or schedule administrator to send update requests directly from the scheduling software to the person performing the work, either by e-mail or through a web interface. This method not only saves much labor for both the team member and the schedule administrator, but also ensures that the information will be more accurate and timely.

For most projects, it is best to perform this process weekly. If the time period is longer, the team member will forget what was completed, when, and how much effort was dedicated to each task. Each team member will usually work on only a small number of activities in a single week, which means the updating process should only take them a few minutes. Note that if you are sending more than five tasks to each team member every week, your schedule is probably too detailed, or you are spreading your resources too thinly.

However you collect the data, be sure to get it in a documented form directly from the person who performed the work. If you do otherwise, the data tends to get “edited.”  This will not only make your schedule updates inaccurate, it will mean you will have inaccurate data in your archives, which will weaken your ability to estimate the next project!

Adapted from Applying Project Control: Critical Elements for Project Planning, Action for Results, Inc., 2009

June Project Management Q&A

Test your project management knowledge with these questions or use them as an exercise to help prepare for your PMP certification exam.

1. Historical information and lessons learned are an example of which of the following typical inputs to PM processes?

2. In activity sequencing, there are three types of dependencies used to define the sequence amongst activities. Which of the following is the correct list of these dependencies?
 

Answers appear at the end of the newsletter.

Schedule Details: How Low Should You Go?

When publishing a schedule to for your project, how much information is too much? 

Consider that most managers above you do not need or care about fine details in tracking progress on a project. They only want to know where you stand on significant portions of the work.

On the team level, having too great a level of detail may be overkill in the day-to-day management of the schedule.  If you have used the typical starting point of the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) as the basis for your schedule, be careful of delving too far down. The WBS may be developed further down for estimating purposes than your schedule really needs to be.

Conversely, planning in too little detail can lead to problems as well. For example, when a number of activities are lumped together and scheduled as one task, it can be difficult to determine progress. The final activity in the sequence may end up crunched because preceding activities took longer than anticipated.

In short, there must be a balance or compromise between scheduling too much or too little information. To accommodate various needs, you may want to consider keeping a more detailed schedule for personal use and one at a higher level to publish for general use.

Adapted from Project Planning, Scheduling & Control, James P. Lewis, McGraw-Hill, 2005

Picturing the Project Schedule

A project schedule represents the planned dates for performing schedule activities and the planned dates for meeting schedule milestones. Developing it is an iterative process and may go through many revisions before the baseline is ready for publishing in the project plan.

The project schedule can be represented in a number of ways, from brief overview to extremely detailed, but it is usually illustrated as a graphical representation in one of three traditional formats:

Project Schedule Network Diagram: This is simply a network diagram with specific dates illustrated for each activity. A network diagram can be a very powerful tool to help the project team manage many aspects of the project, especially the schedule. The network diagram identifies the schedule’s Critical Path, along with Float (also called Slack, Reserve, or Total Float) for activities not on the critical path. This information can be used to effectively plan and control resources, schedules, risks, and budgets.

Bar Chart: Frequently called a Gantt chart, this is the type of schedule representation usually produced with scheduling software such as MS Project or Primavera. In typical bar charts, each activity is illustrated with its start date, finish date, and total duration. Detailed bar charts can also illustrate task interdependencies and much more information.

Milestone Chart: This is very similar to a bar chart, but illustrates only planned start or finish dates for major deliverables and/or other key progress indicators. They are often used with senior management to convey important dates of the project.

Adapted from mScholar PMP Exam Prep, Action for Results, Inc., 2009

Changing the Culture of Missed Deadlines

When you create your project schedule, keep in mind that every deadline you commit to is a promise that you and your team have made to deliver—and delay is not acceptable unless it’s also unavoidable. The best way to ensure you deliver is to be certain that your schedule and its associated deadlines are accurate and reasonable.

However, some companies have developed cultures that routinely impose early deadlines for project deliverables because they have become accustomed to accepting missed dates from their project managers. They live with the situation because “everyone does it.” This only encourages continuing failure to meet deadlines and the problem is intensified rather than solved.

If you find yourself in such a culture, it’s your responsibility to try to turn it around—here are some tips on how:

• When you create your schedule, if you know the work truly can’t be done in the time allotted, negotiate new dates up-front and make sure you stick to them.
• If you sense that you may be in danger of missing a deadline, review your schedule to see if you can make up the lost time by taking shortcuts between now and the final deadline. Always keep in mind that your goal is to save time without affecting the results or the quality of your team’s effort.
• If a missed deadline is absolutely unavoidable, communicate early and often to your management team and project sponsor. In the midst of pressure, it’s easy to overlook the fact that you can ask for an extension, and that it might be granted. This is far better than just letting the matter drop and not communicating with management at all.

The ultimate purpose of any action you take is to create an environment where obligations are met, communication is open, and deadlines are honored. Set a good example and encourage others to follow it.

Adapted from The Little Black Book of Project Management, Michael C. Thomsett, 2002

The Benefits of Critical Path Analysis

In these days of reality television, it’s possible to watch as complete houses are built in less than a week. Consider the planning, organization and coordination needed to achieve this. Without a clear and detailed plan of the activities involved, their duration and sequencing, the availability of resources at the right time and in the right place, such time scales could not be achieved. This is where critical path analysis comes in.

Critical Path Analysis (CPA) describes the process of creating a diagram that shows a project broken down into a series of activities, with activities in the right order and estimating the duration of each. The critical path comprises activities that take longest to complete. They determine the length of the whole project and require close supervision to ensure that resources are available when needed and that activities are completed on time. Where there is the likelihood of an activity on the critical path being delayed, a project manager might consider transferring resources, whether staff or equipment, from a non-critical activity in order to meet the overall project completion date.

Advantages of CPA

• Provides decision makers with a diagrammatic form that is easier to interpret than a list of times, dates and activities.
• Accurately estimates all the activities that need to be carried out, their sequencing and their start and finish times, reducing time lost between activities and helping to keep costs down and providing marketing advantages, whether in terms of price or being first in the market.
• By identifying critical activities, resources including labor, equipment, time and money, can be used more effectively.
• Forces management to consider all aspects of a project and means that if completion of an activity is delayed, careful consideration can be given to the implications and the best course of action to take.

Disadvantages of CPA

• Consultation with the workforce is needed in order to get their cooperation and commitment to ensuring as far as possible that each activity is completed according to plan.
• Data to construct diagrams must be reliable or the analysis will be useless.

Adapted from The Uses of Critical Path Analysis for Businesses,  Gwen Coates, Centre for Economics and Business Education at Staffordshire University Business School, 2005

Reading Room: Scheduling

Integrated Cost and Schedule Control in Project Management, Ursula Kuehn, Management Concepts, 2006

Microsoft Office Project 2007 Step by Step, Carl Chatfield, Microsoft Press, 2007

Projects in Less Time:: A Synopsis of Critical Chain, Mark Woeppel, BookSurge Publishing, 2005

Project Planning and Scheduling, Gregory T. Haugan, Management Concepts, 2001

Project Scheduling and Cost Control: Planning, Monitoring and Controlling the Baseline, James Taylor, HarvaJ. Ross Publishing, 2007

Questions to Ask About Resource Allocation

Part of trying to figure out your project schedule is confirming what resources will be available to you and when, including people.

When trying to determine your project’s people needs, answering these questions can help:

• Did you identify the tasks to allocate to your resources?
• Do you know all the different types of resources you will need?
• Is there a resource pool where you can get all the resources you need? If not, will you need consultants (or otherwise outsource)?
• Did you run a resource histogram for each person?
• Did you need, or attempt, to level each of the histograms?
• When assigning people to tasks, did you consider behavioral as well as technical factors?
• If you use consultants or outsourcing, did you perform a background analysis first?
• If overtime appears in the histograms, is it constant or sporadic? If the former, what steps are you willing to take to deal with the effects of burnout?

Adapted from Project Management Practitioner’s Handbook, Ralph L. Kliemand and Irwin S. Ludin, 1998

Answers to June Q&A

1. The correct answer is (d) Organizational Process Assets.

Organizational Process Assets are often used as inputs to processes, and one reason is that they include the lessons learned and historical data from previous projects which should be considered in whichever process is being considered.

If you chose Enterprise Environmental Factors (b), that is incorrect.  These include factors from inside and outside the organization, comprising the project’s “environment”, which impact the project’s success, such as company culture or government and industry standards.

[Planning], PMBOK Guide, Fourth Edition, p. 32-33

2. Mandatory, discretionary, external (c) is correct.

These are the three types of dependencies listed in section 6.2.2 of the PMBOK Guide. Answer b (schedule, cost, scope) is incorrect. These are overall project constraints and not dependencies.

[Planning], PMBOK Guide, Fourth Edition, pp. 139-140