Project Management Guide

For the management of the large projects, scheduling of the project plays an important role in the smooth executing of project. Project manager face the problems when the project does not complete in the given timelines.

One of the major reasons in delay in the completion of the project is when team members sit idle, waiting for finishing of the task of their colleague. Team member start their task as their colleague complete their tasks. It is the responsibility of project manager to create a good project schedule.

There are some specific techniques like Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM) which are very helpful for scheduling. Completion time of the project depends upon the critical path.

Here are few more tips to fine tune your project schedule:

Create Tasks & Sub Tasks: Divide whole project in to tasks & sub tasks. Calculate the estimated time of all the tasks & sub tasks & related activities.

Impact Analysis: Most of the times, client or customer raises for changes in the requirements. During the revisions in the schedule due to these changes, do a through impact analysis. I’ve seen many projects fail to deliver on time because of improper impact analysis. Most of the times, people do effort estimation for changes on the fly which leads to problems.

Determine Predecessor: Project must contain some activities which are not started until its predecessor activities are completed or we can say that some activities depend upon the other activities. So it is necessary to identify such activities and create schedule accordingly.

Gantt Chart: Create the Gantt chart for the project. It is an effective way to represent the schedule graphically. Gant Chart is a helpful tool for the monitoring a whole project progress.

Identify the critical path of the project. It is easy to know that which activity take longest time for completion and which activities can be delayed without making the project longer.

Reduce the slack time. Slack time is a time in which team members can relax and task are delayed but the project has been finished on time. This way productivity of team can be improved.

Crashing: Delivery time of the project can also effect the scheduling of the project, so it is necessary to reduce the delivery time of the project. You may use crashing for reducing the delivery timelines.

Fast Tracking: For completion of the project in a fix time it has been necessary to execute the entire task on fast track or execute independent tasks parallel.