Prof. Shrikant M. Harle

 Scheduling is a process which tries to organize activities in logical sequence.  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 government organization area there will be a body of knowledge that associates the accomplishment of known work efforts with 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.

 Taking its name from early project management innovator Henry L. Gantt, the basic Gantt chart or now one know it as Bar Chart is an easy way to document schedules.  It is a horizontal-bar schedule showing activity start, duration, and completion.  It shows the connection between events and the calendar, and provides a graphical analogy of the activity duration.

 The Gantt schedule can illustrate the relationship between work activities having duration, events without duration that indicate a significant completion, and milestones that represent major achievements or decision points.  Various comments can be used to communicate the progress of the project effort compared to the baseline plan, as well to depict in a graphical way areas where there are modified expectations from the baseline plan.

 Once a Gantt schedule has been established for a project, progress should be periodically plotted against the baseline schedule.  If different functional areas are involved in a project, each area may need its own detailed schedules to support the project master schedule.  In such cases it is important that working schedules be linked to a common master schedule in a way that they can be easily updated.

 Each activity or event on the schedule should have a responsible individual assigned, so there is clear ownership and so schedule status can be updated without a lot of argument.  “Activity”- An activity is a part of the project denoted by an arrow on the network. The tail of the arrow indicates the start of the activity whereas the head indicates the end of the activity.

 “Event” – Event is the stage or point where all previous jobs merging in it, are completed and jobs bursting out, are still to be completed.  Here 1 and 2 denotes the event form where the activities A, B, C, D can merge of burst out Scheduling process needs duration of the activity.

 A Work Breakdown Structure is a results- oriented family tree that captures all the work of a project in an organized way.  It is often portrayed graphically as a hierarchical tree; however, it can also be a tabular list of "element" categories and tasks or the indented task list that appears in your Gantt chart schedule.

 Large, complex projects are organized and comprehended by breaking them into progressively smaller pieces until they are a collection of defined "work packages" that may include a number of tasks.  The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) is used to provide the framework for organizing and managing the work.

 In planning a project, it is normal to find oneself momentarily overwhelmed and confused, when one begins to grasp the details and scope of even a modest size project.  This results from one person trying to understand the details of work that will be performed by a number of people over a period of time.

 The way to get beyond being overwhelmed and confused is to break the project into pieces, organize the pieces in a logical way using a WBS, and then get help from the rest of your project team.