Project Scheduling Submitted by: Rana Talha Nazir

Scheduling is an inexact process in that it tries to predict the future. While it is not
possible to know with certainty how long a project will take, there are techniques that can
increase your likelihood of being close. If you are close in your planning and estimating,
you can manage the project to achieve the schedule by accelerating some efforts or
modifying approaches to meet required deadlines.
One key ingredient in the scheduling process is experience in the project area; another is
experience with scheduling in general. In every industry area there will be a body of
knowledge that associates the accomplishment of known work efforts with a time
duration. In some industries, there are books recording industry standards for use by cost
and schedule estimators. Interviewing those who have had experience with similar
projects is the best way to determine how long things will really take.
When preparing a schedule estimate, consider that transition between activities often
takes time. Organizations or resources outside your direct control may not share your
sense of schedule urgency, and their work may take longer to complete. Beware of all
external dependency relationships. Uncertain resources of talent, equipment, or data will
likely result in extending the project schedule.
Experience teaches that things usually take longer than we think they will, and that giving
away schedule margin in the planning phase is a sure way to ensure a highly stressed
project effort. People tend to be optimistic in estimating schedules and, on average,
estimate only 80% of the time actually required.
To cut development cost and meet tight deadlines in short staffed software projects,
managers must optimize the project schedule. Scheduling a software project is extremely
difficult, though, because the time needed to complete a software development activity is
hard to estimate. Often, the completion of a task is delayed because of unanticipated
rework caused by feedback between activities in the process.
Before a project schedule can be created, a project manager should typically have a work
breakdown structure (WBS), an effort estimate for each task, and a resource list with
availability for each resource. If these are not yet available, it may be possible to create
something that looks like a schedule, but it will essentially be a work of fiction.

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 value must be equal to the baseline value.
 The remaining effort must be appropriately distributed among team members,
taking into consideration vacations.

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Project Scheduling Submitted by: Rana Talha Nazir

Project Management Tools are very useful if applied in a disciplined manner. If they are
used to replace expertise and in other inappropriate ways, then they will not provide
value for money. Project Managers should constantly review the use and output of tools,
because just because one was bought some time ago, it doesn't mean it is still of value
today or in the future. If you want to migrate data to the next generation system, consider
using open architecture or commercial standard tools and systems, otherwise if you use
be-spoke systems it could be more costly in the future. Also look at what tools your
customers and competitors use. There are three basic tools of Project Scheduling.

• Critical Path Method

• PERT Chart
• Gantt Charts

Critical path Method:

The critical path method
(CPM) or critical path analysis is a
mathematically based algorithm for
scheduling a set of project activities. It
is an important tool for
effective project management.

Basic Technique:

The essential technique for using CPM is to construct a model of the project that includes
the following:
A list of all activities required to complete the project (typically categorized within
a work breakdown structure),
The time (duration) that each activity will take to completion, and
The dependencies between the activities
Using these values, CPM calculates the longest path of planned activities to the end of the
project, and the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making
the project longer. This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the
longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project
longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project
network activities which add up to the longest overall duration. This determines the

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shortest time possible to complete the project. Any delay of an activity on the critical path
directly impacts the planned project completion date (i.e. there is no float on the critical
path). A project can have several, parallel, near critical paths. An additional parallel path
through the network with the total durations shorter than the critical path is called a sub-
critical or non-critical path.
These results allow managers to prioritize activities for the effective management of
project completion, and to shorten the planned critical path of a project by pruning
critical path activities, by "fast tracking"

PERT Charts:
Complex projects require a series of activities, some of which must be performed
sequentially and others that can be performed in parallel with other activities. This
collection of series and parallel tasks can be modeled as a network.
The Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) is a network model that allows
for randomness in activity completion times. PERT was developed in the late 1950's for
the U.S. Navy's Polaris project having thousands of contractors. It has the potential to
reduce both the time and cost required to complete a project.

Steps in the PERT Planning Process:

1. Identify the specific activities and milestones.

2. Determine the proper sequence of the activities.
3. Construct a network diagram.
4. Estimate the time required for each activity.
5. Determine the critical path
6. Determine the critical path
7. Update the PERT chart as the project progresses

Benefits of PERT

1. PERT is useful because it provides the following information:

2. Expected project completion time.
3. Probability of completion before a specified date.
4. The critical path activities that directly impact the completion time.
5. The activities that have slack time and that can lend resources to critical path
activities.
6. Activity starts and end dates.

Limitations:

The following are some of PERT's weaknesses:

• The activity time estimates are somewhat subjective and depend on judgement. In
cases where there is little experience in performing an activity, the numbers may

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be only a guess. In other cases, if the person or group performing the activity
estimates the time there may be bias in the estimate.
• Even if the activity times are well-estimated, PERT assumes a beta distribution
for these time estimates, but the actual distribution may be different.
• Even if the beta distribution assumption holds, PERT assumes that the probability
distribution of the project completion time is the same as the that of the critical
path. Because other paths can become the critical path if their associated activities
are delayed, PERT consistently underestimates the expected project completion
time.

The underestimation of the project completion time due to alternate paths becoming
critical is perhaps the most serious of these issues. To overcome this limitation, Monte
Carlo simulations can be performed on the network to eliminate this optimistic bias in the
expected project completion time.

Gantt Charts:
During the era of scientific management, Henry Gantt developed a tool for displaying the
progression of a project in the form of a specialized chart. An early application was the
tracking of the progress of ship building projects. Today, Gantt's scheduling tool takes the
form of a horizontal bar graph and is known as a Gantt chart, a basic sample of which is
shown below:

Gantt Chart Format

Task Duration Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1 2 mo.
2 2 mo.
3 2 mo.
4 2 mo.
5 2 mo.
6 2 mo.

The horizontal axis of the Gantt chart is a time scale, expressed either in absolute time or
in relative time referenced to the beginning of the project. The time resolution depends on
the project - the time unit typically is in weeks or months. Rows of bars in the chart show
the beginning and ending dates of the individual tasks in the project.
In the above example, each task is shown to begin when the task above it completes.
However, the bars may overlap in cases where a task can begin before the completion of
another, and there may be several tasks performed in parallel. For such cases, the Gantt
chart is quite useful for communicating the timing of the various tasks.

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For larger projects, the tasks can be broken into subtasks having their own Gantt charts to
maintain readability.

Gantt Chart Role in Project Planning:

For larger projects, a work breakdown structure would be developed to identify the tasks
before constructing a Gantt chart. For smaller projects, the Gantt chart itself may used to
identify the tasks.
The strength of the Gantt chart is its ability to display the status of each activity at a
glance. While often generated using project management software, it is easy to construct
using a spreadsheet, and often appears in simple ASCII formatting in e-mails among
managers.
For sequencing and critical path analysis, network models such as CPM or PERT are
more powerful for dealing with dependencies and project completion time. Even when
network models are used, the Gantt chart often is used as a reporting tool.

Advantages of using project management tools are:

1. Tools can facilitate the creation and maintenance of project artifacts (e.g. project
schedule) and especially good at complex analysis (e.g. Earned Value
Management);
2. Tools are very good at linking to sub-projects or other work packages/plans;
3. Tools are very good at providing various outputs (e.g. Gantt Charts, Milestone
Charts, Network Diagrams etc)
4. They can assist in the estimating/scheduling/planning stage and many scenarios
can be run to find the most appropriate course of action;
5. They are a good reminder of what needs to be done and what is outstanding;
6. They can help record, link and analyze lots of data (e.g. Requirements
Management Tool, Change Management Tool; Stakeholder Management Tool or
Lessons Learnt Tool);
7. They are good for trend analysis and looking at prioritizing or re-scheduling
activities (e.g. resource scheduling);
8. Contribute to the build up of statistical information to assist in improving
management of future projects;
9. Allows a more objective comparison of alternative actions/decisions and provides
repeatable results;
10. Helps distinguish between good and bad luck and good and bad management;
11. It can provide electronic methods of approvals, speeding up decision making;

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12. Can be very good when teams are not co-located at one place, and the team can
access data when they need it and not rely on any individual (e.g. methods and
procedure database with the most up-to-date versions on it);
13. Can be good at generating automated reports (e.g. timecards associated with
individual projects), if they are setup in the right way in the first place;
14. Very good at re-assigning authority when individuals are away, so decisions can
still be made and do not rely on single points of failure;
15. The requirement to measure physical items facilitates tighter management
controls.

Disadvantages of using project management tools are:

1. Some people (including management, team members, stakeholders) can find them
difficult to understand;
2. Tools can sometimes take too much time just to maintain the data and keep the
tool updated - Don't under estimate the cost of capturing the data;
3. They take time and effort and funding to train the staff to use;
4. Often can often be expensive and there is a license fee attached to the tool (if not
developed in house) and annual maintenance charges;
5. Change them and updating can be costly and complex;
6. Staff can use them inappropriately and not enter the required data to make them
worthwhile (e.g. risk management tools);
7. They can require lots of data to be generated and if it is not generated, then the
results of the tool maybe suspect;
8. If not understood properly they can be prone to error and can produce misleading
results and can lead the Project Manager to make ill-informed decisions;
9. They can be too complicated, too time-consuming and unnecessary for small
projects;
10. Use with caution on very large and complex networked projects because you can
make a change and this could affect the rest of the project and you may not be
aware of the automated changes the tool makes;
11. People can tend to trust the tool outputs without questioning the rigor that went
into producing the results;
12. It can be very difficult retrospectively looking at what happened if you didn't
capture the input data at the time;
13. Tools can hide the detail and provide a whole project view, which may hide over
performance in one area and under-performance in another.

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Project Scheduling Submitted by: Rana Talha Nazir

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method
• http://www.netmba.com/operations/project/gantt/
• http://www.netmba.com/operations/project/pert/

• http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Advantages_and_disadvantages_of_project_managem
ent_tools

• And Your Notes

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