Project Scheduling Management

PROJECT SCHEDULING MANAGEMENT

The project schedule is the tool that communicates what work needs to be performed, which resources of the organization will perform the work and the time frame. The project schedule should reflect all of the work associated with delivering the project on time. Without a full and complete schedule, the project manager will be unable to communicate the complete effort, in terms of cost and resources, necessary to deliver the project.The project schedule can be viewed and updated by team members associated with the project, keeping everyone well informed on the overall project status.. Schedule management plan is a part of project management plan and can be formal or informal. It expedites the schedule estimation process by providing guidelines on how estimates should be stated. During the monitor and control phase, the deviation from the schedule baseline can be analyzed and acted upon. Reporting of project is also determined by schedule management plan.

Project management tools are important in project scheduling management. First and foremost are easy planning. The project planning process takes a lot of time as you have to map-out all the important steps. A project management tool provides you the ability to easily establish a hierarchy of tasks for effective and efficient completion. It also lets you indicate which steps are sequential and which tasks are dependent on one another. Furthermore, this makes it easier for the team to do their work. This is a time saver, because when the team leader knows which steps are the most important, he or she then knows which tasks to assign to whom. Next, is efficient task management.

Every project consists of numerous tasks that you, or your team, must complete. Writing notes about what your team members are doing is sometimes impossible, especially when it comes to ongoing projects that take a lot of time to complete. This is where a project management tool is very useful. Assign all of the important tasks to employees and monitor how they are performing. Project management becomes much easier as you have access to this data and can follow who has which tasks. Through better task management, teams work in unity. Hence, achieving incredible results and benefiting then company.

The third one is seamless team work flow. Using this software solution gives a team leader a chance to always be able to see the tasks that his team is working on and which team members are involved in the task. Furthermore, there are tasks which require more people. This is where a team leader can include several different people to collectively work on bigger tasks. Creating a seamless team work flow is something very important to attain as it contributes to a company’s sustainable future, as well as creating cohesion within a team. Other than that are, Shared document, calender and contact. Consider that project management tools are useful as they support storage and organization of a variety of documents.

This is extremely important as a majority of projects have a high number of documents. By creating a centralized document storage plan, every team member can easily, and more quickly, edit and contribute. This feature is very important in cases where the work is outsourced to a person or a team. It is much easier to perform all the necessary tasks without sending thousands of emails with attached documents where, sooner or later, things become convoluted.

As well, having access to calendars of other team members is convenient because sooner or later, a meeting between team members has to be organized. So, having access to people’s calendar makes coordinating much easier. Make sure to share a document containing every team members’ contact information. This ensures remote team members can communicate with one other. Last but not least, precise project tracking. Tracking the time spent on every task is of great value. It allows you to collect data about team members, to know their work pace. This will make planning future projects much easier. The team leader can then make much more precise time estimations. For example, a team leader can give different types of tasks to team members throughout a project to determine their strengths. This creates better performance and faster results.

A Gantt chart is a popular project management bar chart that tracks tasks across time. When first developed in 1917, the Gantt chart did not show the relationships between the tasks. Since then, it has become common to track both time and interdependencies between tasks, which is now its everyday use.
Since their first introduction, Gantt charts have become an industry standard. They are an important project management tool used for showing the phases, tasks, milestones and resources needed as part of a project.
One of the first uses was on America's Hoover Dam project started in 1931.

A Logic Network indicates the sequence of activities in a project over time. It shows which activity logically precedes or follows another activity. It can be used to identify the milestones and critical path of a project. It will help you understand the dependencies in your project, timescale, and its workflow.
Valuable information that you may otherwise overlook can be revealed using this technique.