The Definitive Guide to Project Scheduling

Once you’ve determined what type of project schedule to use, you can start building it. This process may vary depending on your industry, organization or project type. However, most project management experts recommend following these steps:

1. Hold a brainstorming meeting. Most experts recommend starting the scheduling process with a team meeting, which may or may not include other stakeholders. You may want to create a rough outline of the schedule or a list of ideas to start the discussion. However, the meeting’s primary goal is to solicit feedback from the people who will actually be working on your project. 

 

 

Your team members have unique insight into how long the work will take and what their own capabilities are. What’s more, by involving them at this stage, you can win buy-in for the project. 

 

 

You may also want to seek input from the client and other stakeholders. They may have unique insight into factors outside your organization that could impact the schedule (for example, the rules and regulations of a client’s company or industry). 
 
At this step, it’s a good idea to reference some of the other related documents listed above. These can give you a better idea of the project’s goals, scope, constraints, deliverables, success criteria, and your stakeholders’ expectations.

2. Determine clear, measurable milestones. A milestone is an event or marker that denotes an important point in the project. As a result, it has no set duration, so a deliverable may count as a “milestone,” but a task would not. Rather, a task is the work involved to reach a milestone or complete a deliverable.

Major milestones include project kickoff and completion. Other milestones may occur at the end of a task or activity; at the end of phases/stages; or at any time where work must be completed or approved. Where contractors are involved, milestones may align with when payments are made. 

Here are some examples of milestones for a product or software development project: 

• Project kickoff
• Approvals of designs and prototypes
• Completion of various phases of testing
• Implementation
• Launch marketing and advertising campaigns
• Shipments to customers
• Project closeout  

3. Create a WBS that includes all project deliverables. As described above, the WBS (which can be part of a project schedule) should detail all the deliverables for the project. It may or may not include a breakdown of the tasks needed to produce the deliverables, depending on your organization. The WBS may be a section within your project schedule, or it may be a stand-alone document that is referred to when creating the schedule. 

At this stage, Bansal says, you should “get in touch with the client to scope the project and finalize the deliverables. It helps to avoid scope creep (the tendency of clients to increase the scope of the project) in the future.”

4. Outline and sequence all tasks/activities. Again, this is either included in the WBS, or is detailed in the schedule itself, depending on your organization. Wherever you put this information, it’s important to clearly document all the tasks necessary to complete the deliverables. This will avoid confusion about what needs to be done to achieve goals and meet deadlines once the project is underway. 

Once you’ve defined all the tasks that need to be performed, use dependencies to sequence them. To do this, consider how the tasks relate to one another, as well as any time or resource constraints on the tasks. 

There are two types of dependencies:

• Finish-to-Start: The predecessor task (Task A) must be finished before work on the successor task (Task B) can begin. 
• Start-to-Start: The successor task (Task B) begins at the same time as the predecessor task (Task A). 

One way of determining task dependencies is to use “network logic,” a process of arranging tasks in the order in which they would logically fall. It may be useful to start with the most difficult tasks first. Defining the priority of each task also helps ensure the most important tasks are completed first. With a clear picture of the sequence of tasks and the relationships between them, you will be better equipped to address scheduling conflicts later on.

5. Define the critical path. Also known as the “critical path analysis,” this is the process of determining the best path to take through all tasks/activities in order to finish a project on time. It involves looking at the project at a high level, breaking it into the most critical tasks, and calculating the time to complete the whole project based on the time it will take to complete those tasks. Managing the critical path is an essential part of project management; if critical tasks aren’t completed, your final deadline may be delayed.

Critical path analysis involves determining the earliest and latest start and end times for critical tasks, and estimating the dependencies between them. You must also factor in the availability of personnel and other resources that could impact timing (for example, equipment needed to start the installation or implementation phase of a project). In this way, you identify the longest possible sequence of tasks involved in finishing the project.

6. Estimate task duration. This is one of the hardest parts of project scheduling, but it’s also one of the most important since it has a huge impact on project cost. The term “duration” refers to the number of working hours, days, weeks, or months that you expect team members will need to complete a task. 

In Smartsheet, you can set the duration for a task in increments of minutes, hours, days, or weeks. In Microsoft Project, there are three different duration options for estimating costs and times:

• Fixed work: When the work is based on a predetermined quantity, such as delivering a given number of products, or working a certain number of hours.
• Fixed duration: This designation is used for team meetings or milestone review sessions.
• Fixed units: This is the default setting and it reflects the number of resources assigned to a given task, and the percentage of their time they’re available to work on it. For example, a team member assigned to work 20 hours per week (of a 40-hour work week) on a task would have a fixed unit of 50 percent. 

Estimating duration correctly is important for both parties—it keeps clients happy, since work progresses on schedule, and it keeps team members happy, since they can easily meet deadlines. However, underestimating how long tasks will take is a common project management mistake. This causes project “frenzy,” which occurs when the team hurries to complete too much work in too little time, and the client has to compensate with additional funds. In this case, quality suffers, and morale decreases on both sides.

“Make sure to keep some buffer time in the schedule,” Bansal suggests. “More often than not, things don't always go as planned, and the buffer time helps you get things back on track.”

Many factors impact task duration, such as:

• Team members’ individual schedules
• National holidays, office closures, and last-minute emergencies
• Team and client meetings and time spent collaborating
• Team members’ skill, experience, and efficiency levels
• Errors and miscommunications during project planning and development

However, there are some things you can do to improve scheduling effectiveness:

• Recognize that most people don’t work at 100 percent efficiency all the time, and estimate duration accordingly
• Look at historical data for projects with similar scopes and resource requirements to make time estimates
• Consult outside experts and/or research similar projects done by other organizations if no internal data is available to use as a baseline

Indeed, says Gailliard of Orchestrating Your Success, “Pulling historical information to create a schedule would put you ahead of the game. It is much easier to edit and change than to start with nothing.”

7. Estimate resources. Another important step is determining what resources are available to work on your project. Some team members may be working on multiple projects at once, which can cause scheduling conflicts. Resource allocation can help you avoid missing deadlines and over burdening specific team members. 

To estimate resource availability, consider:

• The sequence in which tasks need to be completed
• Time restrictions, such as team members’ vacations and other work, as well as company holidays and office closures
• Cost restrictions, such as the number, skill levels, and hourly requirements of team members the client’s budget will cover
• How skills and experience of team members affect their ability to complete work within certain time frames

Using project management software with resource management functionality can make this step much easier. For example, Smartsheet’s resource view dashboard allows you to view staff availability across multiple projects at a glance. In Microsoft Project, you can also view availability and assign resources to individual tasks using the Gantt chart view. If you don’t have a project management program, consult project, company, and individual calendars to determine availability.

“Be sure to accommodate weekends, holidays, vacations into [the] schedule—and don’t forget people might get sick, as well. So, provide as much padding as possible.” Fennema advises.

As mentioned in the WBS section above, it can be helpful to break tasks down so that each task can be assigned one resource as its “owner.” This allows for more granular control over the work being done. 

8. Note assumptions. Record any assumptions made during scheduling that could impact the timeline. This provides transparency and facilitates changes later on. 

“Clearly spell out assumptions,” Trump Excel’s Bansal advises. “For example, in one of my projects, we assumed that the client would get the required reports, while the client assumed otherwise. This led to a huge cost implication.”

As another example, if it was assumed that an experienced team member would be completing a given task, this should be noted in the schedule. That way, if a team member with less experience is later assigned to the task, the project manager will see the assumption, and build extra time into the task duration to accommodate them. Failing to include this assumption could cause project delays, since the less experienced worker will likely complete the task slower.

9. Determine and document risks. Analyzing the risks involved with your project can help you schedule accordingly. Make sure to include extra time in your schedule to deal with both identified and unidentified risks. 

Examples of risks include: 

• Resource unavailability
• Incorrect duration estimations 
• Tasks being performed by less experienced team members 
• The use of new technology team members are unfamiliar with
• Misunderstandings between your team and the client about elements of the project scope or schedule

A good practice is to add a “risk multiplier” to tasks where you’ve identified risks. A risk multiplier is a percentage of time that will be added to the schedule, based on the severity of the risk and the importance of completing the task on time. For particularly high-risk projects, you can include an extra task in the schedule just for risk management, so extra funds can be set aside to cover potential delays.

Fennema, of Beyond the Chaos, notes the importance of this step. “Be sure to include time in your schedule to tackle the unknown and unexpected. No project will run perfectly,”  she says.

BrandExtract’s Bishop also recommends that you “identify any potential risks before finalizing a project schedule. If I plan on a week of review, but the client knows it will take them two weeks to get approvals … we need to work that out up front.”

10. Review and revise schedule. Congratulations, you’ve completed your schedule! Now, it’s time to review everything, make sure it’s accurate, and make any necessary changes. 

Check your schedule to ensure that:

• Task start and end dates align with staff availability 
• Milestone, deliverable, and task start and end dates are realistic
• The right resources are assigned to the right tasks
• Schedule constraints, such as vacations, holidays, and equipment availability have been accounted for
• All tasks have dependencies
• There are no large chunks of work without milestones
• Extra time is included to accommodate identified and unidentified risks
• Your schedule aligns with the project’s critical path analysis

Meet with your team both before and after you’ve created the schedule to get their feedback on its feasibility. Gailliard recommends, “verifying tasks, resources, and costs with the project team.” Alternatively, you can ask team members for their own time, task, and resource estimates, then see if they align with your own. 

Fennema suggests consulting with your client or customer, as well, and suggests, “After you develop the schedule with the people who will do the work, make sure you get buy-in from the people who are expecting the delivery, to make sure that they are available and able to work during testing times or launch times, etc.”

If you’ve distributed resources improperly, you can use a technique known as “resource leveling.” This involves rearranging the sequence and/or assignment of tasks so work is divided evenly among team members, and helps prepare for potentially unavailable resources. Some project management software platforms can perform resource leveling for you, or you can do this process manually, using calendars to verify availability.

Another way to check your schedule is through “what-if” scenario analysis. This involves using a simulation to measure the risks of different negative scenarios, such as a project delay or cost overrun. Then you can compare the impact of these risks, and make contingency plans in case they occur. Again, make sure to add risk multipliers for tasks that are high-risk. Some software systems can do “what-if” analysis for you, as well. 

When your review is complete and your schedule has been approved, you now have a “baseline schedule.” Since the schedule is a living document, it may be revised at various points throughout the project life cycle, but the baseline schedule will be used to begin the execution phase. Once the project is underway, you can compare actual timelines and costs with what was predicted in the baseline schedule.