No matter how organized you are, scheduling everything for an entire project is a massive leap from planning an individual’s work. Project scheduling is much more than weekly planner notes. As an essential part of project management, the process involves creating a document that details a project’s timeline and the resources required to complete each task.
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A project schedule is akin to a timetable that sequences activities and milestones you need to complete in a certain amount of time. It is a framework to allocate, perform and complete tasks within a duration while communicating the resources available. The purpose of project scheduling is to convey critical information to the team comprehensively.
Effective scheduling is crucial to project success and leads to increased customer satisfaction while reducing costs. It helps detect issues like resource shortage in early stages, thereby mitigating risks and budget overshoots.
Overview
Project scheduling involves creating a detailed project agenda that organizes all project to-dos and their deadlines. Project schedules work in tandem with a work breakdown structure (WBS), which breaks down projects into smaller achievable milestones. According to PMI, WBS organizes and defines a project’s scope by decomposing it into work packages.
Managing a project without a schedule is like building your dream house with just a picture, basic tools and a nagging question: where do we even start? Immaculate project scheduling answers all your basic questions, resolves uncertainties and provides a clear path to the finish line.
Define all your project tasks, start and end dates, workflow cycle and resources needed to cover the project scope. It also monitors team workflows by offering you visibility into every individual’s progress. The process eventually helps you optimize workload management.
Notably, it is never a static process. You will have to add or remove tasks, redefine milestones if they take longer than expected, and update schedules continuously. Comprehensive schedules keep you at the helm of all deliverables in the course of a project’s life cycle.
Project scheduling is part of the planning phase, where you identify your schedule plan, deliverables and requirements. Try to include the following in your plans:
- Tasks and deliverables
- Task start and completion dates
- Task dependencies
- Project calendar
- Task duration and project timeline
- Work packages
- Budget preparation
- Resource availability
- Risk analysis
It’s not as daunting as it sounds. Here are some essential ideas to keep in mind:
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Project Scheduling vs. Project Planning
Project scheduling and project planning are often used interchangeably, but they differ significantly. Project planning is a much broader undertaking, while project scheduling is a single piece of the overall puzzle. Broadly, when you complete the initiation phase, you transition to the planning phase, where you build a complete plan. During the planning phase, you gauge resource availability, create an outline, define requirements, set a baseline and scope and then move to the scheduling phase.
Project planning defines project goals, costs, scope and resources required to complete tasks in time. These plans remain unchanged in most cases, and you adhere to them even during unexpected pitfalls. However, scheduling is dynamic and adapts according to the project flow. All project management schedules require you to be agile and implement change management protocols whenever necessary.
Types of Scheduling
Before getting into project scheduling, you need to know which method will work the best for you. Let’s take a look at some popular methods:
Gantt Charts
One of the oldest methods, Gantt charts, uses a bar chart to visualize scope against time. They depict project schedules and dependencies between different tasks against date or time. Gantt charts simplify complex information and present it in a clear and understandable format. Back in the day, project managers had to waste time sketching Gantt charts manually. Today, most project scheduling tools offer Gantt chart capabilities to make your job easier.
Gantt Charts arrange project tasks on X-axis and completion durations on Y-axis.
Gantt charts can show you:
- Milestones for your task groups
- Task overviews detailing what the team needs to do
- Estimated time for each activity in hours and minutes
- Team members and their assigned tasks
- Task dependencies
- Activity overlaps
- Activity deadlines detailing when a job, milestone or the entire project needs to start or finish
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Kanban Boards
Though Gantt charts are a preferred method, many teams integrate Kanban boards into their workflow management. Kanban boards offer a simple interface for you to get to business straight away. You can visualize your work using several columns like to-do, progress and done to take care of your in-progress tasks and boost efficiency. Every column comprises a set of cards that represent an essential component or individual tasks. The column arrangement helps you determine a task’s status depending on the card placement.
Kanban arrangement neatly organizes pending and completed tasks.
Kanban boards bring transparency to processes by removing bottlenecks while highlighting resource constraints and potential inefficiencies. Kanban boards can either be physical boards where employees move actual cards or post-it notes from one column to another or digital boards where teams from different locations collaborate and track project progress in real time.
Kanban boards can help you in the following ways:
- Provide a strong foundation for organizing all work
- Better tracking of projects and tasks
- Shorter project delivery cycles
- Improve workflows by providing qualitative and quantitative understanding
- Enhance customer satisfaction by improving delivery cycles and project predictability
- Happier workforce due to transparent work environment
Sprints
Sprints form a fundamental part of the agile project management methodology. Sprint planning is relevant if you need help breaking down an enormous project scope into manageable milestones. You can divide your large project into smaller groups or sprints, typically lasting for two weeks.
Sprint board showing task break-ups and employees handling them.
Sprints are a great way to schedule projects. For starters, they prioritize tasks for your team to focus on the most critical things, enhancing decision-making. Additionally, setting a fixed time frame fosters efficient team communication, resulting in quicker follow-ups. Sprints also help teams shift from abstract ideas to concrete plans, focusing on the tiniest of details.
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Benefits
Project scheduling has many benefits in overall project management, but let’s focus on how it impacts execution.
Simplifies Communication
Communication is a perpetual problem in project management because it involves human factors. You can’t assume that all your stakeholders will communicate with each other since they are all part of the same project. So how do you work around the issue? Effective project scheduling is one way to reduce the need for constant communication. Project schedules give a peek into what every team member is working on while providing an idea of when they will complete their tasks.
Prevent Scope Creep
Scope creep is like an unwelcome guest you don’t want to meet but have to counter in every project cycle. By definition, it refers to the new set of expectations that stakeholders introduce to the table even after everybody has agreed to the project scope. A comprehensive and dynamic project schedule prepares you to respond to scope changes while giving you time to mitigate their impacts. According to PMI’s pulse of profession report, 30% of the companies that built robust processes did not suffer scope creep.
Monitor Progress and Costs
Expert scheduling gives you remote control of resources and project performance all along your project’s lifecycle. You will be aware of your budget spends while knowing whether the scope creep can affect your total costs. Tracking costs is crucial since a Wellington report reveals that only 43% of the companies complete projects within their set budgets.
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How to Schedule Effectively
Do you often get stuck while creating schedules because you don’t know where to begin? The following is a step-by-step guide to take you through the process:
Step 1: Divide Projects into Milestones
Creating a WBS is the initial step in constructing a project schedule after gathering all relevant data. At this stage, you have to break down the general scope of your operations according to milestones that you set out for every tangible work achievement. The process will structure your timelines efficiently while making it easy for you to communicate progress to stakeholders.
Step 2: Prepare Task Outlines
Once your milestones are defined, you will want to detail your schedule preparation process. Here, you need to get specific with your employees’ tasks by creating task outlines. Rather than overwhelming your team with all the project deliverables, construct a shortlist of easily achievable tasks.
Step 3: Define Dependencies
Identifying dependencies is crucial to avoid unnecessary delays. Gauging which tasks depend upon others is essential to keep the pace intact. If you miss these seemingly innocuous details, your timelines will suffer.
Step 4: Estimate Task Time
Your scheduling can’t be accurate if you don’t know how long each task will take to complete. Your project schedule will be relevant if you have task timelines in place. You can even involve your team to predict task completion estimates by brainstorming the duration for each. However, estimations aren’t foolproof and can differ during the execution stage.
Step 5: Set Start and End Dates
Task timelines are not enough to reach reliable time estimates for the entire project. Setting launch and end dates will make your life easier as you have to answer fewer questions. Once you have a numerical definition for your project, you can set the ball rolling to try out your theories in practice.
Step 6: Assign People to Tasks
Take a hard look at your available resources and assign relevant employees to tasks. It is crucial to avoid overlooking any employee and assigning tasks with overlapping time frames. You will want to make things clear and easy for everyone to comprehend and follow.
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Final Thoughts
Project scheduling provides you with answers to three vital questions — what to do, when to do it and who will handle it. It lists tasks against the employees who will perform them along with their deadlines. The more comprehensive your schedule, the better prepared your team is to carry out its tasks. It is best to update your schedule when changes occur so that your employees have accurate information.
Proper techniques accurately zero in on individual tasks while displaying the bigger picture of meeting milestones. To simplify things, you can resort to technology for your stakeholders to visualize their schedules. You can also choose project management software that offers scheduling and other capabilities to streamline your processes.
How has project scheduling benefitted your organization? Tell us in a comment down below!