Scheduling tips and techniques

Scheduling is an important part of every project manager’s job. I’ve developed a lot of schedules over the years, and each one was very dynamic – they changed a lot from their first iteration to final close-out. Here are a few tips to developing a better schedule.

Tips for a better schedule

The six hour day

Here in the U.S. most company’s use a standard eight hour day. For the most part, most people do not work a full eight hours. That’s not to say they are not good workers. Between meetings, coffee and bathroom breaks, and just recalibrating to start a new task, each person seems to work about six hours per day on average. When scheduling work, this is a good assumption.

Get the resources to help – don’t dictate.

When estimating time, work with the person that is going to do the task. Let them tell you how long it’s going to take and negotiate from there.  Sometimes you run into a person who won’t own an estimate.  It’s important that the person doing the work “buy into” the time frames. If they just won’t, then their manager needs to step in. This might call for a meeting with you, the recalcitrant employee, and the employee’s manager. Try very hard not to tell them how long it should take – unless maybe you’re an expert on this particular task and know the capabilities of the person doing the task.

Get a committment on the finish date and move on. Sometimes, once the other tasks have been entered, folks decide they can finally be of assistance.

Be reasonable

Many folks try very hard to validate their schedules with various tools and heursitics. For an example go to PM Knowledge Center. If your company requires this type of validation, by all means go ahead and run the numbers. O

My advice is just to be reasonable. Work with your team and their managers to get agreement on the time frames, milestones, and final product. The schedule is just one tool of many used to manage a project. Don’t spend all your time here at the expense of common sense.

Make milestones easy to find

When developing a schedule, I try to have a milestone about once per month for a project going six months or longer. If the project is shorter, maybe a milestone every two weeks. The point is to have a near term goal and periodic success to communicate to your stakeholders. Make a point to report based on these milestones. Most software packages allow for a milestone chart that is very useful for that periodic communication to upper management. This shows your progress without delving into all the gory details.

Scheduling evaluation

I try to do a basic technical schedule evaluation to insure I haven’t made any awful miscalculations. Again, I try to use common sense when looking at the dates and the flow of the schedule. Having worked for the U.S. Government for a while as a contractor, I use the DCMA schedule evaluation (Defense Contract Management Agency) list as a guide.  I’ll go into that in more detail in the next post!

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What are your best scheduling tips? Let us know in the comments.