The Schedule Development process is the heart of the Planning process group. This is where you lay out the schedule for your project activities, determine their start and finish dates, and finalize activity sequences and durations. This process, along with Activity Resource Estimating and Activity Duration Estimating, is repeated several times before you actually come up with the project schedule. The project schedule, once it's approved, serves as the schedule baseline for the project that you can track against in later processes.
You'll learn later in this section that project management software comes in very handy during this process. In fact, it is one of the tools and techniques of this process.
We've got a lot of material to cover in this process. We'll start out with the inputs to the Schedule Development process and then follow up with an in-depth discussion of the tools and techniques of the process. These techniques will help you get to the primary output of this process, which is the project schedule.
Schedule Development Inputs
Schedule Development has nine inputs, seven of which arc outputs from other Planning processes. The inputs arc as follows:
• Organizational process assets
■ Project scope statement
■ Activity list
■ Activity attributes
■ Project schedule network diagrams
■ Activity resource requirements
■ Resource calendars
■ Activity duration estimates
■ Project management plan (risk register)
You can sec how important it is to perform all of the Planning processes accurately because the information you derive from almost every process in the Planning group is used somewhere else in Planning, many of them here. Your project schedule will reflect the information you know at this point in time. If you have incorrectly estimated activity durations or didn't identify the right dependencies, for example, the inputs to this process will be distorted and your project schedule will not be correct. It's definitely worth the investment of time to correctly plan your project and come up with accurate outputs for each of the Planning processes.
As with several other processes, constraints and assumptions arc highlighted as the elements of the project scope statement to pay particular attention to. Constraints arc with you throughout the life of the project. The most important constraints to consider in the Schedule Development process arc time constraints. well the time constraints in this process fall into two categories: imposed dates and key events or major milestones.
Imposed dates arc used to restrict the start or finish date of activities. The two most common constraints used to restrict dates arc enforced by most computerized project management software programs. They arc "start no earlier than" and "finish no later than" constraints. For example, let's go back to Chapter 6*s house-painting example. The painting activity cannot start until the primer has dried. If the primer takes 24 hours to dry and is scheduled to be completed on Wednesday, this implies the painting activity can start no earlier than Thursday. This is an example of an imposed date.
Key events or milestones refer to the completion of specific deliverables by a specific date. Stakeholders, customers, or management staff may request that certain deliverables be completed or delivered by specific dates. Once you've agreed to those dates (even if the agreement is only verbal), it's often cast in stone and very difficult to change. These dates, therefore, become constraints.
You'll learn later in this section that project management software comes in very handy during this process. In fact, it is one of the tools and techniques of this process.
We've got a lot of material to cover in this process. We'll start out with the inputs to the Schedule Development process and then follow up with an in-depth discussion of the tools and techniques of the process. These techniques will help you get to the primary output of this process, which is the project schedule.
Schedule Development Inputs
Schedule Development has nine inputs, seven of which arc outputs from other Planning processes. The inputs arc as follows:
• Organizational process assets
■ Project scope statement
■ Activity list
■ Activity attributes
■ Project schedule network diagrams
■ Activity resource requirements
■ Resource calendars
■ Activity duration estimates
■ Project management plan (risk register)
You can sec how important it is to perform all of the Planning processes accurately because the information you derive from almost every process in the Planning group is used somewhere else in Planning, many of them here. Your project schedule will reflect the information you know at this point in time. If you have incorrectly estimated activity durations or didn't identify the right dependencies, for example, the inputs to this process will be distorted and your project schedule will not be correct. It's definitely worth the investment of time to correctly plan your project and come up with accurate outputs for each of the Planning processes.
As with several other processes, constraints and assumptions arc highlighted as the elements of the project scope statement to pay particular attention to. Constraints arc with you throughout the life of the project. The most important constraints to consider in the Schedule Development process arc time constraints. well the time constraints in this process fall into two categories: imposed dates and key events or major milestones.
Imposed dates arc used to restrict the start or finish date of activities. The two most common constraints used to restrict dates arc enforced by most computerized project management software programs. They arc "start no earlier than" and "finish no later than" constraints. For example, let's go back to Chapter 6*s house-painting example. The painting activity cannot start until the primer has dried. If the primer takes 24 hours to dry and is scheduled to be completed on Wednesday, this implies the painting activity can start no earlier than Thursday. This is an example of an imposed date.
Key events or milestones refer to the completion of specific deliverables by a specific date. Stakeholders, customers, or management staff may request that certain deliverables be completed or delivered by specific dates. Once you've agreed to those dates (even if the agreement is only verbal), it's often cast in stone and very difficult to change. These dates, therefore, become constraints.