project management Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...

, a schedule is a listing of a

project A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...

's milestones, activities, and deliverables. Usually dependencies and resources are defined for each task, then start and finish dates are

estimated Estimation (or estimating) is the process of finding an estimate or approximation, which is a value that is usable for some purpose even if input data may be incomplete, uncertain, or unstable. The value is nonetheless usable because it is der ...

from the

resource allocation In economics, resource allocation is the assignment of available resources to various uses. In the context of an entire economy, resources can be allocated by various means, such as markets, or planning. In project management, resource allocatio ...

budget A budget is a calculation play, usually but not always financial, for a defined period, often one year or a month. A budget may include anticipated sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities including time, costs and expenses, environme ...

, task duration, and scheduled events. A schedule is commonly used in the project planning and

project portfolio management Project portfolio management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on num ...

parts of

. Elements on a schedule may be closely related to the work breakdown structure (WBS)

terminal element In category theory, a branch of mathematics, an initial object of a category is an object in such that for every object in , there exists precisely one morphism . The dual notion is that of a terminal object (also called terminal element): ...

s, the Statement of work, or a Contract Data Requirements List.

Overview

In many industries, such as engineering and construction, the development and maintenance of the project schedule is the responsibility of a full-time scheduler or team of schedulers, depending on the size and the scope of the project. The techniques of scheduling are well developed but inconsistently applied throughout industry. Standardization and promotion of scheduling best practices are being pursued by the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE), the

Project Management Institute The Project Management Institute (PMI, legally Project Management Institute, Inc.) is a U.S.-based not-for-profit professional organization for project management. Overview PMI serves more than five million professionals including over 680,0 ...

(PMI), and the US Government for acquisition and accounting purposes. Project management is not limited to industry; the average person can use it to organize their own life. Some examples are: * Homeowner renovation project * Keeping track of all the family activities * Coaching a team * Planning a vacation * Planning a wedding Some project management software programs provide templates, lists, and example schedules to help their users with creating their schedule.

Methods

The project schedule is a calendar that links the tasks to be done with the resources that will do them. It is the core of the project plan used to show the organization how the work will be done, commit people to the project, determine resource needs, and used as a kind of checklist to make sure that every task necessary is performed. Before a project schedule can be created, the schedule maker should have a work breakdown structure (WBS), an effort estimate for each task, and a resource list with availability for each

resource Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon thei ...

. If these components for the schedule are not available, they can be created with a consensus-driven estimation method like Wideband Delphi. To develop a project schedule, the following needs to be completed: * Project scope * Sequence of activities * Tasks grouped into 5 project phases (conception, definition & planning, launch, performance, close) * Task dependencies map * Critical path analysis * Project milestones In order for a project schedule to be healthy, the following criteria must be met: * The schedule must be constantly (weekly works best) updated. * The EAC (Estimation at Completion) value must be equal to the baseline value. * The remaining effort must be appropriately distributed among

team A team is a group of individuals (human or non-human) working together to achieve their goal. As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management, " team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to inf ...

members (taking vacations into consideration). The schedule structure may closely follow and include citations to the index of work breakdown structure or deliverables, using decomposition or templates to describe the activities needed to produce the deliverables defined in the WBS. A schedule may be assessed for the quality of the schedule development and the quality of the schedule management.

Overview

Methods

See also

References

Further reading