Planning and Scheduling: Make Trade-offs and Optimize
Summary: The first pass of scheduling a project rarely leads to an acceptable balance between the business and project objectives, the scope of work necessary to achieve those objectives, the time available, and the resources and budget available to the project. A series of tradeoffs must be made in one or more of these areas in order to align the plan with the project's objectives. Risks to accomplishing the project objectives must also be also be considered and related tasks incorporated into the schedule if necessary.
This guideline will help you and your team ...
- Align schedule and resource assignments with the project's overall goals
- Revisit the project's overall objectives
- Revisit the Flexibility Matrix to identify hard constraints and areas which have flexibility
- Align the schedule with the objectives by applying optimization activities
- Reaffirm any new objectives with all project stakeholders
What you get:
- An explanation of the foundation for making trade-offs through project objectives and the Flexibility Matrix
- Examples of using flexibility information to hone in on possible project trade-offs
- Steps for optimizing the project schedule
- Guidelines for modifying the project objectives statement
- Completion criteria for the optimization process