0.11 Project planning  (Page 15/21)

If the caterers come too early, the food will sit around under heat lamps! But, if they come too late, then the band won’t have time to play. I just don’t see how we’ll ever work this out!

It’s not easy to plan for a lot of resources when they have tight time restrictions and overlapping constraints. How do you figure out a schedule that makes everything fit together? You’re never going to have the complete resource picture until your done building the schedule. And the same goes for your activity list and duration estimates too! It’s only when you lay out the schedule that you’ll figure out that some of your activities and durations didn’t quite work.

Project schedule

The project schedule should be approved and signed off by stakeholders and functional managers. This assures they have read the schedule, understand the dates and resource commitments, and will likely cooperate. You’ll also need to obtain confirmation that will be available as outlined in the schedule. The schedule cannot be finalized until you receive approval and commitment for the resource assignments outlined in it.

Once the schedule is approved, it will become your baseline for the remainder of the project. Project progress and task completion will be monitored and tracked against the project schedule to determine if the project is on course as planned.

The schedule can be displayed in a variety of ways, some of which are variations of what you have already seen. Project schedule network diagrams will work as schedule diagrams when you add the start and finish dates to each activity. These diagrams usually show the activity dependencies and critical path.

The critical path method is an important tool for keeping your projects on track. Every network diagram has something that is called the critical path. It’s the string of activities that, if you add up all of the durations, is longer than any other path through the network. It usually starts with the first activity in the network and usually ends with the last one.

Aunt Jane is a vegetarian. That won’t be a problem, right?

Well, let’s see. What menu did we give the caterers?

We didn’t give it to them yet; because we won’t have the final menu until everyone RSVPs and lets us know which entrée they want.

But they can’t RSVP because we haven’t sent out the invitations! What’s holding that up?

We’re still waiting to get them back from the printer. We can’t send them out if we don’t have them yet!

Oh no! I still have to tell the printer what to print on the invitations, and what paper to use.

But you were waiting on that until we finished the guest list.

What a mess!

Steve thought Aunt Jane being a vegetarian was just a little problem. But it turns out to be a lot bigger than either Steve or Susan realized at first! How’d a question about one guest’s meal lead to such a huge mess?

The reason that the critical path is critical is that every single activity on the path must finish on time in order for the project to come in on time. A delay in any one of the critical path activities will cause the entire project to be delayed ( [link] ).