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A project schedule is a document created by the project manager with the help of the employees responsible for the tasks.
Generally performed within a software or through spreadsheets, it serves to obtain a planning of the activities with deadlines, resources, tasks, delivery dates, costs, milestones, among other important features and details to stand out within a company project.
Developing a schedule is essential to ensure the planning and organization of all involved in the project, keeping everyone aligned with the activities.
Remember that a good project manager needs to create an efficient schedule and that it should get customer approval.
Why is a project schedule so important?
With a schedule it becomes much more efficient the vision, monitoring and monitoring of the progress of the activities, ensuring the execution of the tasks within a period that aligns with the delivery date of the project in question. It also helps stimulate the team and avoid delays, complications and budget problems.
How to build a project schedule?
- Make a pre-planning
- What will be accomplished/objective.
- Where the schedule will be made (by spreadsheet or which software/tool).
- Resources needed to execute actions within the schedule.
- Set available budgets.
- Set instructions and rules for project monitoring.
- Build the Project Analytical Structure (EAP)
- Organize activities
- Set the duration of activities
- Draw up the schedule
- Monitor the schedule
Before starting any project schedule, it is important to define some essential aspects, such as:
Having all this established, it will be easier to identify the stages and tasks of your project.
This is the stage in which it must decompose the visual scope of the project, the list of activities. It is like a map that helps to get a complete view of all the stages of the project and facilitates the completion of the schedule.
The project manager must identify the main phases and stages, those responsible for the activity and the tasks necessary to achieve the final goal, dismembering the larger activities for the minors.
The EAP will serve to hierarchize activities and to plan and conduct your project. In addition, it helps those responsible for the project to organize ideas and understand what should be accomplished as a whole.
After the EAP is done, it is time to sequence the activities in order of importance and execution, with details and specifications. Set priorities considering the most important activities and the most meaningful sequence.
At this moment, it is extremely important to have the support of the team to pay attention to the interdependencies between them. In other words, make it clear whether one task depends on the other, so that there is no confusion among the collaborators in the future, implying the progress of the project.
Now that the activities are organized in order, it is time to determine with the team what the duration/times of each of them will be, taking into account the available resources, risks, unforeseen and deadline.
Now that you have all the necessary information organized, the time has come to actually create your schedule to start accompanying you.
If you have chosen project management software, this step becomes easier because with these activities, the tool will adapt your schedule and generate Gantt Graph (tool to monitor project execution).
And if you have opted for a spreadsheet such as Excel or PowerPoint, you will have to sort all the information manually, which requires a little more work, since such tools have not been developed properly to plan or create projects.
Now that you've drawn up your schedule, it's extremely important not to forget to save the baseline to start monitoring it.
To get an effective schedule, it is essential to keep it up to date with any data and new information.
Remember also that He must be followed! And that's why all these steps are extremely important, a schedule should not suffer changes in deadlines and mainly, sequence of activities!
If you are interested and want a product presentation, please schedule an appointment with us at the following link: Microsoft PPM Easy Presentation.
Original content from the MLPro editorial library, fully preserved and translated for the English website.