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Plan Development: Project Schedule and Critical Path
Quick Summary
This is the fifth of a series of six templates for project plan development. This one gives a checklist of scheduling activities to be performed on a set of tasks that have had a first pass at assigning ownership, identifying dependencies, and estimating durations.
What this is
This is the fifth of a series of six templates for project plan development. This one gives a checklist of scheduling activities to be performed on a set of tasks that have had a first pass at assigning ownership, identifying dependencies, and estimating durations. The result is a task schedule in calendar time. The scheduling activities in this checklist will likely cause some tasks to be reassigned and others to be broken down into new tasks. Some dependencies may be changed. Hence, the scheduling process is iterative with both the previous planning processes and with optimization (see the template Plan Development: Optimizing Project Plan Tradeoffs).
Why it's useful
Scheduling is effectively the translation of task durations and dependencies into calendar time and reconciling the resulting milestone and delivery dates with the project's overall goals. The first pass at scheduling typically yields a starting point for the optimization process, rather than a completed plan. Doing these scheduling activities after a first pass at assigning ownership, dependencies, and durations will help generate an accurate schedule with a minimum of overlooked work and with a minimum of accurate task duration estimates undistorted by date pressure influence. "The Schedule" is the most common view looked at by senior management, because it is something they can relate to and therefore manage to. For this reason it is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL that no team or project manager commit to any schedule without building the schedule on a foundation of a complete work breakdown and best-efforts task duration estimates. No senior manager who wants to be successful should be party to "quickie scheduling". It is not good for the customer, the company, or the project team.
How to use it
Once a first-pass has been made at the work breakdown, task ownership, dependency identification, and duration estimates, perform the scheduling activities in this checklist. If you are not already in a software scheduling tool, enter the tasks list now. You can use either a Gantt chart view or a PERT view (or both); there is no "best" choice. Sometimes PERT charts can show complex dependencies more clearly; Gantt charts are more compact and show more information per unit area.
While using a Gantt or PERT view during task scheduling, you should also periodically use other views that your scheduling tool provides. Some common ones are the following:
| Resource Schedule: | A table of resource names vs. dates, with person-hours for each name and date. |
| Resource Graph: | A bar chart or histogram showing when resource time assignments exceed 100% of their available time. |
| Critical Task List: | A list of the tasks currently on the critical path |
During the scheduling process, keep task durations "pure". Try not to incorporate into task durations such schedule attributes as slack time, waiting time, overhead tasks, or work calendar attributes such as days off. These attributes may become hidden in the duration, and as tasks are moved during re-planning, they will be lost or will distort the schedule. Instead, show these schedule attributes explicitly as slack time between tasks, an accurate work calendar, explicit fixed-time and date tasks for vacations and other scheduled overhead, "phantom" tasks for unscheduled but predictable periodic overhead tasks, and a uniform, agreed-upon factor for unscheduled overhead that is applied uniformly to all task durations.
Use the correct task type or task constraint to accurately model dependencies. For example, in Microsoft Project, you can assign a number of constraints, including "As Soon As Possible" (the default), "As Late As Possible", "Finish No Earlier/Later Than", "Must Start/Finish On", and "Start No Earlier/Later Than".
Be aware if your scheduling tool uses "effort-driven" scheduling. With effort-driven scheduling, the first resource assignment to a task causes a "hidden" computation of Effort, the number of hours needed to complete a task independent of resources. From then on, any change made to the number of resources on that task will alter the Duration. For example, a task is initially assigned one resource and a Duration of 4 days. If later you assign a second resource, an effort-driven scheduler will reassign a Duration of 2 days. In Microsoft Project 98, effort-driven scheduling is turned ON by default; in earlier MS Project versions it is turned OFF by default.
A reminder from the task duration estimating process: keep in mind the following distinction between duration, effort, and calendar time:- Effort is the person-hours required to complete a tasks, without considering any slack time, waiting, non-working days or other delays. Effort (first-order approximation) is independent of the number of people working on a task.
- Duration is the number of hours to complete a task, taking the number of resources into account. Thus (first-order approximation) a task with a duration of 4 days with one resource will have a duration of 2 days with two resources.
- Calendar time is the time it will take to do a task, considering work hours, holidays, slack time, waiting, etc. The scheduling process creates calendar time from durations, dependencies, task constraints, and resource limitations.
Plan Development: Task Identification and Work Breakdown 
Identify project tasks and develop a work breakdown structure.
Plan Development: Task Assignment and Deliverables
Track the assignment of project tasks to individual owners, along with the deliverable description and effort required.
Plan Development: Logical Relationships and Dependancies
Identify and capture task dependancies.
Plan Development: Task Duration
Process for estimating and assigning task durations.
Plan Development: Optimizing Tradeoffs
Optimize a project plan after the first pass base schedule has been developed.
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