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The Art of Schedule Management

April 2, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Scheduling

The Art of Schedule Management
By Owen Head

The art of project management, is in part, the art of simplification. Specifically, simplifying large complex deliverables into small pieces that can be accurately estimated and managed. Keeping that in mind throughout the planning phase is the golden rule of successful execution. This principle applies to schedule management as much, if not more, than anywhere else.

The reason for this is that the project schedule is the most visible part of any project plan. The first question on everyone’s lips is always, “are we on schedule”? The assumption, of course, is that quality is a given in any answer to that question. Therefore the statement, “we’re x days behind schedule”, translates to “it will take us x days from this point to complete all deliverables due today in full compliance with all quality and workmanship requirements”. It’s just the way we think about progress.

OK, but how do you keep a schedule simple but effective? Well let’s start with some basic ideas. First of all, time is made up of some pretty small increments at the low end, so you have to decide just how granular you really need to be. Do you need to manage in minutes, hours, half days, days, or weeks? Second, how much freedom do you want to give your team members from micro-management? To manage in daily increments, for example, would require daily updates from team members. Finally, how long is the project (let’s assume it isn’t really a project unless it at least six months in duration)? Taking these questions into account, the work week often surfaces as the atomic schedule increment of choice (some exceptions will often exist for specific types of activity).

Using the work week significantly simplifies schedule management, making all non-critical-path items due on the Friday (or any fixed week day) of the week in which they deliver. Since nothing is late until end of business (EOB) Friday, schedules may be tracked using simple week numbers (1-52) instead of more granular daily dates (mm/dd/yy). The use of week numbers eliminates the need to check the calendar in most cases. Mercifully, this approach also leaves the weekend as a built in grace period when being late is just too undesirable. It’s nice to have a second chance when things suddenly go south at the last minute.

As the PM, employing a once a week update sets the tone with team members that they are completely in control of their week (no micro management), with no interference until Friday when a reforecast/deliverable is due. If they fail to deliver at those points, then their work suddenly becomes very visible in status reporting (not good for anyone).

Aligning status reporting to Friday EOB snapshots simplifies reporting for all team members, executives, and stakeholders as everyone quickly learns to manage to the snapshot. Team members work to put their best foot forward and provide the most accurate view possible in time for each snapshot. At the same time, the noise level associated with status queries from management disappears as they work to the regular weekly update, leaving your team to be more productive.

Of course, missing a Friday due date should never be a surprise. Weekly or regular status meetings should identify any schedule slippage well in advance of the due date. Those delays should be captured in status reports along with any corrective actions being taken to remedy the situation. Response actions should be escalated to management when management intervention can help in ways the team cannot. This gives management a chance to intervene and assist with additional resources or other steps at their disposal. Sometimes a delay can’t be avoided, but it’s unacceptable when raised too late for management to react effectively.

There are other rules of thumb related to simplification that tie very well into a weekly assessments and deliverables schedule. As an example, it’s also useful to size the duration of bottom level WBS components to increase the accuracy of estimates and limit the size of schedule misses. A choice of 3-4 weeks is optimal for many projects/situations, but can vary base on the type of work or the management culture in which the work is being performed. Using a 3-4 week standard, a 16 week assignment will be divided into multiple 3-4 week tasks, because the PM has learned that SME’s are more accurate when estimating and meeting schedules for tasks of this size. This effectively amounts to load balancing from top to bottom of the schedule and WBS to simplify estimating, reporting, and comprehension of the project schedule.

Activities and tasks often size themselves with little room for PM manipulation, but overall project success, especially in large projects, is based more on the PM’s ability to create many very small successes than any other factor. The PM can play a major role in ensuring those small successes by limiting complexity in scheduling and sizing tasks in a way that “sets each team member up for success”.

Scheduling Tips

  • Don’t get caught up in tools based scheduling provided by tools like MS Project. These tools do a great job of managing the schedule down to the hour and minute, but that level of detail will just confuse your stakeholder community.

  • Keep reports simple (and very concise) if you want your stakeholder community to actually read them and stay involved.

Owen Head has over nineteen years of technical Program and Project Management experience in ISO/TL 9000 compliant organizations. He has built a number of PM Office practices from ground up, and managed more than 70 technical, business process, and change management programs and projects, in all areas of IT and Telecom development and support. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and has been certified as a Project Management Professional (PMP) by the Project Management Institute (PMI).

Owen is the Managing Director of PMOSoft, LLC, a company dedicated to PM Office performance maturity, through fast and affordable maturity management system (MMS) solutions. For more information, please visit http://www.pmosoft.com or our blog http://pmosoft.wordpress.com.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 and is filed under Project Management Best Practices, Scheduling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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