From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Develop a schedule management plan - Microsoft Project Tutorial

From the course: Project Management Foundations: Schedules

Develop a schedule management plan

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- [Instructor] You might think planning how you schedule a project is excessive. A schedule management plan simply means that you document the scheduling choices you make for your project. A schedule management plan can be formal or informal depending on the needs of your project. The first choice in a scheduling plan is the method to use, such as critical path method or critical chain. In the Agile world, you might choose Scrum or Kanban. In fact, your organization may already have one or more approved methods you can choose from. The example in this course is best suited to the critical path method, so we'll use that approach. Once you choose the scheduling method, you can choose the scheduling tool that supports your selected method, such as Primavera, Microsoft Project and so on. Additional choices you document in your scheduling plan are how accurate you want to be and how you'll measure progress. Do you want your estimates to be plus or minus 50%? 25% or even 10%? Depending on project size, are you going to measure work effort in hours, days or weeks? In our example, the work is well-known, so we're going to estimate plus or minus 10% and measure tasks mostly in days. The scheduling plan is also where you describe your update procedures. What data are you going to get from the team? How will you update your schedule? And how often do you update? In our example, at the end of each week, people will report when they start their assignments, how many days they've worked so far and how many days they think are left. Then we'll use that data to update assignments in the scheduling tool we use. You might also specify the variance from the baseline that triggers corrective action. In our example, action will be taken when a task is going to finish a week later than it's supposed to. With larger projects, you might document processes in more detail and specify the performance measures you'll use in reporting. It's also helpful to document schedule processes step-by-step so everyone performs the steps consistently. That's a brief look at what goes into a schedule management plan. The schedule management plan for the example project is in the exercise folders. For practice, develop a schedule management plan for one of your own projects.

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