Understanding Schedules: The Foundation of Project Success

What are Schedules?

Schedules are a commitment to work for an individual person, they can be a contract for an organization. For example - Customer might be paying an organization to finish a project within a given schedule.

Why do we need them at the first place?

If not for schedules we would be pulling our hair out, struggling to figure out what to do next and trying to find a link with the existing work. Essentially schedules act as organisers, not only to our brains but also to an organization as a whole.

Schedules help everyone in a project see how their work fits into the bigger picture and motivate them to make their part work smoothly with others.

As for Project Managers schedules are a place to raise questions on how realistic the work scope can be i.e. what a project is being asked to do vs what appears to be possible in a given period of time.

Schedules bring a psychological shift

When things are written down with accountabilities and names assigned to them, it becomes a commitment to follow through. When put in place, they force a change in perspective, attitude and behaviour. Should the same schedule be ingrained in someone's mind, they will remain there indefinitely, ready to be carried out.

Need for Flexible Scheduling in Project Management

Schedules are a tool to track progress and break work into manageable chunks. For PMs, good schedules provide a clearer view of the project and flush out any challenges or oversights by making adjustments, asking questions, and helping the team respond to issues that arise.

Methodologies like waterfall, agile, extreme programming, and feature-driven development are used to tackle organizational and project challenges in software development and project management. However, adapting these approaches to meet specific project and team needs often requires a deeper understanding beyond the methodologies themselves. Instead of rigidly following the rule book, focus on understanding the core strengths of each methodology and adapt them to fit the unique needs of your project.

Example: A complex schedule can be broken down into smaller weekly milestones. There is no rule that says a lengthy, rigid schedule must be followed to the letter, flexibility can make the process far more manageable and effective.

Rule of Thirds

In his popular management book Making Things Happen, Scott Berkun suggests dividing project time into three parts: one for Design, one for Implementation, and one for Testing. This approach works well for any project schedule, as roughly one-third of the time is typically spent on defining "what needs to be done," another third on completing "what is done," and the final third on testing "what was done."

All that glitters is not gold

A carefully formatted schedule with precise dates might be far from perfect because it lacks the flexibility to adapt to unexpected changes and doesn't consider the complexities of actual implementation. While it is good to set precise deadlines, the understanding that schedules need to be flexible is what makes a schedule work in the first place.

Building a solid schedule

A clear understanding of the requirements and effort needed to execute them in alignment with the team's capabilities is what forms a solid schedule. As a starting point it is good to produce a rough estimate of a schedule and make adjustments with time and integrating feedback from the project team. Use of project management tools to. create schedules eliminates the cumbersome task of repetitive work and streamlines process.