An Introduction to Project Scheduling

Please also read my article with title "the importance of time" which will give you soul of time management and spirit to project scheduling. Project scheduling basically is a combination between art and technique of managing time. It is art and mechanism to communicate with the stake holders of project, including direct users, on what tasks needed to be executed and how many resources will be allocated to perform those tasks within time frame.

Plan and scheduling of project execution is essential to the project management since it is used in coordinating tones of activities to be performed to assure quality on every business process and to achieve objective of project. Fail in project scheduling will lead to significant delay and quality failure which ultimately will cost to significant loss of production and business opportunity. In short, if we can manage time with proper scheduling then we can manage good quality, resource, budget, cost, risk, safety, and many other things.

Project schedule is a house of activities list where executors need to perform them to deliver the project in time. Initially the Project schedule is developed in strategic level i.e. project master plan which covers major and critical activities and milestones. Top management will monitor the status of project from this level. Subsequently the executors of project will develop break down to more detail and deeper schedule level. It can be up to level 5 schedule in order to control the activities from very short time frame, i.e. hours duration.

Controlling hundreds even thousands activities may risk to over complicated job and out of control. Therefore the support of scheduling software such as Primavera and Ms. Project will be much helpful in scheduling job. Project activities is dynamic and moving every time which is frequently changing, therefore scheduling software will help to automatically updates tasks that are dependent one to another. It also generates many analysis and reports automatically such as threshold reminder, delayed tasks, critical path, cost over run, etc., so project users will have early warning and anticipation of incoming risks to recover any delay and overcome problems.

Finally, it is wrong to think that project schedule belongs to scheduling group only. The project schedule shall be owned by all project stakeholders as their responsibility to control their project business process and completion to be in time every time.

Please take a look my video at the beginning of this article regarding overview of project scheduling technique with software. If you are interested to learn or to order job for your project scheduling, I will be glad to have work with you.