Summary of Project Schedule Management
1. Project Schedule Management is about the processes involved in managing the timely completion of
a project.
2. There are six processes involved in Project Schedule Management. These are as follow:
a. Plan Schedule Management;
b. Define Activities;
c. Sequence Activities;
d. Estimate Activity Durations;
e. Develop Schedule;
f. Control Schedule.
3. Plan Schedule Management is the process of establishing the policies, procedures and documentation
for planning, developing, managing, executing and controlling the project schedule. The output of this
process is the Schedule Management Plan.
4. Define Activities is the process of identifying and documenting the specific actions to be performed
to produce the project deliverables. The outputs of this activities are activity list, activities attributes,
milestone list, change request, and project management plan updates.
5. Sequence Activities is the process of identifying and documenting relationships among the project
activities. The inputs are Project Management Plan, Project Documents, Enterprise Environmental
Factor and Organizational process assets. The outputs are Project schedule network diagrams and
Project documents updates.
6. Estimate Activity Durations is the process of estimating the number of work periods needed to
complete individual activities with estimated resources. The benefit of this process is that it provides
the estimate amount of time each activity will take to complete.
7. Develop Schedule is the process of analyzing activity sequences, durations, resource requirements,
and schedule constraints to create a schedule model for project execution and monitoring and
controlling. The benefit of this process is that it generates a schedule model with planned dates for
completing project activities, by using tools and techniques such as schedule network analysis and
critical path method.
8. Control Schedule is the process of monitoring the status of the project to update the project schedule
and managing changes to the schedule baseline. The benefit of this process is that the schedule
baseline is maintained throughout the project. Schedule baselines are projected schedules, based on
information that is known to date. Dates and estimates in baseline schedules are expected to change
through execution.
9. In the constant changing environment, where priorities may change, adaptive approaches need to be
used. A Project Manager needs to be familiar the tools and techniques, and apply them effectively in
order to address and manage these changes.
10. With high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability environment and marketplace, some trends and
emerging practices have been recognized. Two of such practices are listed, which are as follow:
a. Iterative scheduling with backlog - iterative scheduling is a multi-pass heuristic scheduling
procedure in which scheduling is carried out iteratively until a better schedule results, or
further scheduling is stopped when no further improvement to the project duration can be
obtained. This approach is often used to deliver incremental value to the customer or when
multiple teams can concurrently develop a large number of features that have few
interconnected dependencies. The benefit of this approach is that it welcomes changes
throughout the development life cycle.
b. On-demand scheduling - The concept of on-demand scheduling is related to lean
manufacturing where the products are produced only when there is a demand. Using ondemand scheduling, the work is pulled from a queue when the resources are available. Ondemand scheduling is done in order to balance the demand against the workers' output. Ondemand scheduling does not rely on a schedule that was developed previously for the
development of the product or product increments, but rather pulls work from a backlog or
intermediate queue of work to be done immediately as resources become available.