« Agile to Waterfall Dictionary
Project Definition Phase »

The EDGE Project Scheduling

September 14, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Management Best Practices, Scheduling

The EDGE Project Scheduling
By Thomas Cutting

Over the next several months, our company will be upgrading the project management system and adjusting our processes to take advantage of new features. One of the features getting a significant amount of interest is resource management. The ability to plan resource availability in advance will allow us to understand our project capacity and identify bottlenecks in time to adjust.

The key to making this work will be creating and maintaining realistic project schedules with resources assigned and hours tracked at the task level. The tricky part of making this time tracking switch is getting the team members to buy into the concept of entering actual hours into the system and re-estimating the time remaining. In order to make this happen you will need an EDGE.

Expect Resistance. Your team will push back when you inform them of the new expectation to record their project hours at the task level. The obvious reactions you will get include:

  • It will take too long to break up my time.
  • I work on too many projects for this.
  • Why are you micromanaging me?

Anticipate these issues and have answers available. As an example, include additional time on the project schedule for status and timekeeping; up to an hour per week per project.

Direction from the Top. Communicating the change needs to come from as far up the organization as possible. When the CIO says this will help make us successful it carries a lot more weight than just you as a project manager advocating it. The directors and supervisors need to buy in, too. If management doesn’t take action when time isn’t recorded then nothing will happen.

Give Up Some Detail. In order to make this work you may need to cut down on the level of detail in the schedule. Trying to divide time up into 2-4 hour chunks for 3 different projects will drive them insane. The opposite temptation is to drop all the way back to the Phase level or, worse, the Project level. Either one of these is too high. Break tasks down to between 8 and 80 hours (approximately 2 weeks of effort). Additional details can be listed and tracked as started / completed in a spreadsheet to ensure specific tasks are assigned, worked and closed.

Explain the Purpose. It is important to clearly communicate why a more detailed accounting of the project time is required. Begin by explaining the need to understand resource usage and availability but make sure you follow up with these:

  • Being over or under an estimate is expected. The theory is that they will balance each other over time.
  • A realistic understanding of where we are off schedule allows us to discuss how to get back on track.
  • Re-estimating at the task level allows us to re-plan when future resources are needed. This is especially useful if we are ahead of scheduled or if other projects require the same resources.
  • This is not intended to single any individual out or micromanage the team.
    It will help identify areas where additional resources, training or other assistance can make a difference.
  • By reviewing the workload across all projects, management can find workload issues and take actions to correct them.

As the team sees this information being used to make project decision they will realize its importance get on board.

Thomas Cutting, PMP is the owner of Cutting’s Edge (http://www.cuttingsedge.com/) and is a speaker, writer, trainer and mentor. He offers nearly random Project Management insights from a very diverse background that covers entertainment, retail, insurance, banking, healthcare and automotive verticals. He delivers real world, practical lessons learned with a twist of humor. Thomas has spoken at PMI and PSQT Conferences and is a regular contributor to several Project Management sites. He has a blog at (http://cuttingsedgepm.blogspot.com).

Share this article:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • blogmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Yahoo! Buzz

Related Articles

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 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.

1 person has left a comment

Great post! I have definitely gotten resistance from team members in past projects, they just don’t understand the importance of capturing the actual work data. Maybe a good way to hammer the idea in is to make an incredibly low estimate for a task they need to work on and tell them that this is what they thought it would take last time and we didn’t get a chance to pull any real data. Of course this will put the project (and project manager) in trouble, too…

Are you using LiquidPlanner for capturing this information? LP has a great system for logging estimate & actual work done for all project tasks. (http://www.liquidplanner.com)

Dina Garfinkel, PMP wrote on September 21, 2009 - 10:36 pm | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories