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Department of Information Technology

Chapter Three PART III

Project Scheduling
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 Project Scheduling
• A project schedule is a timetable that organizes project tasks, activity durations, calendar
start and end dates, and sets overall project milestones on a timeline.

• Project schedules also define the team members and resources needed to complete
tasks.

• Project scheduling is fundamental for planning and control in project management.

• All the work necessary to complete the deliverables is accounted for in the project
schedule; it also includes all associated costs as outlined in the project budget.

• Clearly, the project schedule is an essential tool to deliver a project on time and within
budget

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Cont…
• Project schedules are created and tracked with project scheduling software, which has
key features that allow project managers to monitor the progress of tasks, resources and
costs in real time.

• Project schedules are created during the project planning phase and are crucial to the
creation of a project plan, where the schedule plan, schedule baseline, deliverables and
requirements are identified

• The project schedule is designed to guide the project team throughout the execution
phase of the project.

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 Cont…
• The steps to create a project schedule:
o Create the schedule plan for your project

o Define who has authority over the schedule

o Identify start and end dates for project activities and tasks

o Figure out task dependencies

o Sequence activities and tasks chronologically to create a project calendar

o Estimate needed resources and resource availability

o Determine duration of activities and tasks

o Build project schedule

o Monitor and control throughout the project life cycle 4

How to Make a Project Schedule: In-Depth
• Project scheduling occurs during the planning phase of the project life cycle. When
beginning to put together a schedule for your project, you should ask yourself four things
to start:

1. What needs to be done?

2. When will it be done?

3. Who will do it?

4. Where will it be done?

• The answers to these four questions will greatly inform your project schedule moving
forward, as you’ll use this information to plan start and end dates, link activities, set the
duration, create milestones and manage resources.
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 What is Time Management in Project Management?

• Time management is the management of the time spent, and progress made, on project
tasks and activities.

• Time management is a key aspect of managing a project. When a team is working on a

project, it needs to be organized to meet deadlines and streamlined to have quick
collaboration.

• Excellent time management requires the planning, scheduling, monitoring, and

controlling of all project activities.

• When some people refer to project time management, they’re also referring to the tools
and techniques used for managing time.

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Cont…
• Project time management involves the processes required to ensure timely completion
of a project.

• Project time management includes seven main processes as follows:

Planning schedule management involves determining the policies, procedures, and

documentation that will be used for planning, executing, and controlling the project
schedule.

Defining activities involves identifying the specific activities that the project team
members and stakeholders must perform to produce the project deliverables.

Sequencing activities involves identifying and documenting the relationships between

project activities. 7
 Cont…
Estimating activity resources involves estimating how many resources people,
equipment, and materials a project team should use to perform project activities.

Estimating activity durations involves estimating the number of work periods that are
needed to complete individual activities.

Developing the schedule involves analyzing activity sequences, activity resource

estimates, and activity duration estimates to create the project schedule.

Controlling the schedule involves controlling and managing changes to the project
schedule

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Cont…

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 Planning Schedule Management

• The first step in project time management is planning how the schedule will be
managed throughout the life of the project.

• Project schedules grow out of the basic documents that initiate a project.

• The project charter often mentions planned project start and end dates, which
serve as the starting points for a more detailed schedule.

• The schedule management plan, like the scope management plan, can be
informal and broad or formal and detailed, based on the needs of the project.

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 Defining Activities
• Defining activities involves identifying the specific actions that will produce the project
deliverables in enough detail to determine resource and schedule estimates.

• The project team reviews the schedule management plan, scope baseline, enterprise
environmental factors, and organizational process assets to begin defining activities.

• Outputs of this process include an activity list, activity attributes, a milestone list, and
project management plan updates.

• The activity list is a tabulation of activities to be included on a project schedule. The list
should include the activity name, an activity identifier or number, and a brief description
of the activity.

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 Activity Sequencing
• Activity sequencing involves reviewing the activities in the detailed WBS, detailed product
descriptions, assumptions, and constraints to determine the relationships between activities.

• Also included in activity sequencing is to evaluate the reasons for dependencies and the
different types of dependencies.

• A dependency or relationship is the sequencing of project activities or tasks.

• For example, does a certain activity have to be finished before another can start? Can the
project team do several activities in parallel? Can some overlap?

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 Network Diagram
• Network diagrams are the preferred technique for showing activity sequencing.

• A network diagram is a schematic display of the logical relationships among project

activities and their sequencing.

• The letters A through J represent activities with

dependencies that are required to complete the project.
These activities come from the WBS and activity definition
process described earlier.

• The arrows represent the activity sequencing or

relationships between tasks. For example, Activity A must
be done before Activity D, and Activity D must be done
before Activity H.

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 Cont…
• In this step, you need to identify which tasks are the most important. To define your
priorities, you may want to use the following criteria.

• Important and urgent: These are tasks that are done immediately and personally.

• Important but not urgent: These are the tasks you have committed to complete and that
have a solid due date, but they don’t need to be done today..

• Not important but urgent: These are usually tasks that need to be completed
immediately, but not necessarily by you. Try to delegate as much as possible.

• Not important and not urgent: These tasks can be defined as “busy work.” These type of
tasks have little or no value and should be eliminated if possible.
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Cont…

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 Estimating Activity Resources
• Before you can estimate the duration for each activity, you must have a good idea of
the quantity and type of resources (people, equipment, and materials) that will be
assigned to each activity.

• The nature of the project and the organization will affect resource estimates. Expert
judgment, an analysis of alternatives, estimating data, and project management
software are tools that can assist in resource estimating.

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 Cont…
• Important questions to answer when estimating activity resources include:
o How difficult will specific activities be on this project?

o Is anything unique in the project’s scope statement that will affect resources?

o What is the organization’s history in doing similar activities? Has the organization
done similar tasks before? What level of personnel did the work?
o Does the organization have people, equipment, and materials that are capable and
available for performing the work? Could any organizational policies affect the
availability of resources?
o Does the organization need to acquire more resources to accomplish the work?

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Estimating Activity Duration
• Activity duration estimation is the next step in project time management after activity
definition and sequencing.

• Duration refers to the actual amount of time worked on an activity plus elapsed time,
whereas the effort means the number of work days or work hours required to complete a
task.

• Duration relates to the time estimate, not the effort estimate.

• The inputs to activity duration estimating include the detailed activity list and sequencing
and historical information.

• The outputs of activity duration estimating include duration estimates for each activity, a

document describing the basis of the estimates, and updates to the WBS. 18
 Cont…
• Expert judgment

• Confer with people familiar with or experienced in working on a similar task. Their experience can
help you define a reasonable time frame to complete the task.

• Analogous estimation

• Look at similar past projects to estimate how long this project will take. For example, if it took you
30 minutes to update information on a web page, you can reasonably estimate that it will take 30
minutes to update a web page of similar length.

• Parametric estimation

• This strategy is similar to analogous estimating except that it allows for scalability. For example, if
it takes you two hours to mow a one-acre lawn, you can estimate that it will take you four hours
to mow a two-acre lawn. 19
 Developing Schedule
• Schedule development uses the results of all the preceding project time management
processes to determine the start and end dates of the project and its activities.

• Project time management processes often go through several iterations before a project
schedule is finalized.

• The ultimate goal of developing a realistic project schedule is to provide a basis for
monitoring project progress for the time dimension of the project.
• Several tools and techniques assist in schedule development:
• A Gantt chart is a common tool for displaying project schedule information.
• Critical path analysis
• Critical chain scheduling
• PERT analysis

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 Why we use scheduling ?
• Project scheduling provides the following benefits:

• Assists with tracking, reporting, and communicating progress

• Ensures everyone is on the same page with tasks, dependencies, and deadlines

• Highlights issues and concerns, such as a lack of resources

• Identifies task relationships

• Monitors progress and identify issues early

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The Framework for Scheduling techniques
Essentially, there are six steps which are common to both the techniques. The procedure is
listed below:

1. Define the Project and all of it’s significant activities or tasks.

2. Develop the relationships among the activities. Decide which activities must precede
and which must follow others.

3. Draw the "Network" connecting all the activities. Each Activity should have unique
event numbers.

4. Assign time and/or cost estimates to each activity

5. Compute the longest time path through the network. This is called the critical path.

6. Use the Network to help plan, schedule, monitor and control the project 22
 Gantt Charts

• Gantt charts provide a standard format for displaying project schedule information by
listing project activities and their corresponding start and finish dates in calendar form.

• Gantt charts are sometimes referred to as bar charts because the activities’ start and end
dates are shown as horizontal bars.

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Critical Path Method
• Critical path analysis (CPA) is a project management technique that requires mapping out
every key task that is necessary to complete a project.

• It includes identifying the amount of time necessary to finish each activity and the
dependencies of each activity on any others.

• The Critical Path Method estimates the maximum and minimum time required to complete a
project.

• CPM also helps to identify critical tasks that should be incorporated into a project.

• The critical path method is built around the use of predecessors and successors for each
construction task needed to accomplish the job.

• Most tasks (except the initial task) will have one or more predecessors that need to be
accomplished before that task can start. 24
 How to Calculate the Critical Path

• Here are the steps to calculate the critical path in project management:

1. Collect Activities: Use a work breakdown structure to collect all the project activities that
lead to the final deliverable.

2. Identify Dependencies: Figure out which tasks are dependent on other tasks before they
can begin.

3. Create a Network Diagram: A critical path analysis chart, or network diagram, depicts the
order of activities.

4. Estimate Timeline: Determine the duration of each activity.

5. Use the Critical Path Algorithm: The algorithm has two parts; a forward pass and a
backwards pass.
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 Cont…
6. Forward Pass: Use the network diagram and the duration of each activity to determine
their earliest start (ES) and earliest finish (EF).

• The ES of an activity is equal to the EF of its predecessor, and its EF is determined by the
formula EF = ES + t (t is the activity duration).

• The EF of the last activity identifies the expected time required to complete the entire
project.

7. Backward Pass: Begins by assigning the last activity’s earliest finish as its latest finish.

• Then the formula to find the LS is LS = LF – t (t is the activity duration). For the previous
activities, the LF is the smallest of the start times for the activity that immediately
follows.
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Cont…
8. Identify the Float of each activity: The float is the length of time an activity can be
delayed without increasing the total project completion time. Since the critical path has no
float, the float formula reveals the critical path: Float = LS – ES or LF-EF

9. Identify the Critical Path: The activities with 0 float make up the critical path

• The Critical Path Method has the following three purposes :-

1. To calculate the project completion date

2. To identify to what extent each activity in the schedule can slip (float) without increasing the finishing
date length of the project

3. To identify the activities with the highest risk that cannot slip (float) without changing the project
finish date

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Example
Activity Duration Predecessor (s)
A 7 -
B 9 -
C 12 A
D 8 A,B
E 9 D
F 6 C,E
G 5 E

1. Construct network Diagram for the project

2. Calculate forward and backward passes
3. Determine the project competition time
4. Calculate the slack (float) values
5. State the critical path 28
Solution
2. Backward Pass

1.

2. Forward Pass
3. Slack , each activity is represented as the
following
Rectangle where A is an activity, t the duration it
takes ES earliest start , EF earliest finish , LS
Latest time to start and LF latest time to finish

Slack=LS-ES or LF-EF

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Cont…
Project Completion time
32 weeks

5. State the critical path

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Class work
Activity Duration Predecessor (s)
A 7 -
B 8 A
C 10 A
D 6 A
E 2 A
F 5 B,C
G 8 F,D,E
H 7 E
I 5 F
J 2 I,G,H

1. Construct network Diagram for the project

2. Calculate forward and backward passes
3. Determine the project competition time
4. Calculate the slack (float) values
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5. State the critical path
INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT ONE/EVALUATE OUT OF 15% SUB. DATE-NEXT WEEK
Activity Duration Predecessor (s)
A 7 -
B 8 -
C 10 -
D 6 A,B
E 2 B,C
F 5 A,B
G 8 C
H 7 D,E,F
I 5 D
K 2 G
L 5 G
M 8 H,J
N 7 I,L

1. Construct network Diagram for the project

2. Calculate forward and backward passes
3. Determine the project competition time
4. Calculate the slack (float) values
5. State the critical path
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 Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)
• PERT is a way to schedule the flow of tasks in a project and estimate the total time
taken to complete it.

• This technique helps represent how each task is dependent on the other.

• To schedule a project using PERT, one has to define activities, arrange them in an
orderly manner and define milestones.

• PERT is a three-Point Estimation technique. This technique uses three different

estimates to arrive at a final estimate.

• It is a weighted average technique that reduces bias and uncertainty from the
estimation and improves accuracy.
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Cont…
• Most Likely Estimate (Tm):- The chance of completing an activity is highest within this
duration.

• Optimistic Estimate (To):- This is a best-case scenario. Here the estimate is determined
by considering all favorable conditions.

• This is the shortest duration to complete the task.

• Pessimistic Estimate (Tp):-This is a worst-case scenario. Here the -estimate is

determined by considering all unfavorable conditions; the longest time the activity may
take to complete.
• The formula to calculate the PERT is as follows:
o PERT Estimate = (To + 4Tm + Tp) / 6
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 Example
• Your team members tell you that an activity you are working on is most likely to be
completed in 20 days. However, the worst case, it might take 30 days, and if all conditions
are favorable, it might be completed in 15 days. Determine the PERT time estimate for
this activity.
• Solution

• We need the Optimistic Time, Pessimistic Time, and Most Likely Time for the activity to

determine the PERT estimate.

PERT Estimate = [Optimistic Time + 4 X (Most Likely Time) + Pessimistic Time] / 6

= [15 + 4X20 + 30] / 6 = [15 + 80 + 30] / 6 = 125 / 6 = 20.83 days

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