The Planning Process / Realistic Scheduling

The Planning Process
Realistic Scheduling
Ch 7

Introduction
A successful project should meet the goal on time and within budget. In addition to that a successful project should have a realistic schedule. A practical schedule that is feasible to accomplish. Such schedule would include a detailed knowledge, a task sequence and an account of constrains that are not within the capability of the team to solve considering objective of all the team members.

Planning
On planning any project there are two stages should be considered, the preparing stage and the developing stage. The preparing stage is when the project is defined with a work plan that states the purpose, scope of the project and the responsibilities of each team member. Also, the project manager should prepare a risk log. While the development stage is recognizing resources available, building a breakdown structure, identifying task relationship, creating a schedule, and estimate work packages in size and in milestones.

Milestones
A milestone is defined to be an event or a stage in the life of an event that demonstrate progress or development of that event with time. That been said, it is obvious that the two most important milestones in any given project are the first and the last. There are three good reasons for me as a project manager to use. These reasons are:

- To mark inputs from one project party to another.
- To keep progress organized and easy to read.
- To catch any potential problem as soon as it happens.

Scheduling
As project progresses, it is imperative that tasks are completed in such a way that a successor task doesn’t start until the predecessor one is completed (fig 7.3 pg 137). Or what is called a finish-to-start relationship which is the most common task relationship on the network. This requires an adequate scheduling and awareness of the delivery date especially if it is an externally imposed finish date. Externally imposed deadlines usually do not come with a little or no float and once the float is used up the project will run in the negative float. That happens when the finish date is impossible to meet, hence for the experienced project manager the float should not be an opportunity to move slow on tasks.


End Point

Reading Realistic Scheduling, I realized couple of concepts I wasn’t implimenting in my project. As important as the milestones are to any successful project, I really did not include them in my work plan, simply because I wasn’t aware of them and their significance to my project. Although I had a float in the finish date, I didn’t take the negative float possibility in my consideration. Although it is not too late to incorporate new milestone as the project progresses but still I would save a lot of valuable time had I used them.
The second was the finish-to-start task relationship. I'm not sure whether that would’ve worked for me but definitely my work plan would’ve been more precise and better organized. I had more than one task going the same time. It didn’t ruin my project but for sure it spread out my resources unnecessarily.



Reference:

- Verzuh, Erick (2005). The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management. 2nd edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.