P.U.

Swami Sarvanand Giri Regional Centre

Panjab University

Assignment On
Time Management :
Importance of project schedules,
schedules & activities

Name : - Parag Sharma

Roll No : - 1619
Submitted To : - Dr. Satish Kumar
What Is Project Scheduling?
Project scheduling is a mechanism to communicate what tasks need to get done
and which organizational resources will be allocated to complete those tasks in what
timeframe. A project schedule is a document collecting all the work needed to
deliver the project on time.

A project is made up of many tasks, and each task is given a start and end (or due
date), so it can be completed on time. Likewise, people have different schedules,
and their availability and vacation or leave dates need to be documented in order to
successfully plan those tasks.

Whereas people in the past might have printed calendars on a shared wall in the
water-cooler room, or shared spreadsheets via email, today most teams use online
project scheduling tools. Typically, project scheduling is just one feature within a
larger project management software solution, and there are many different places
in the software where scheduling takes place.

For example, most tools have task lists, which enable the manager to schedule
multiple tasks, their due dates, sometimes the planned effort against that task, and
then assign that task to a person. The software might also have resource
scheduling, basically the ability to schedule the team’s availability, but also the
availability of non-human resources like machines or buildings or meeting rooms.

How to Schedule a Project

Before going deeper into project scheduling, let’s review the fundamentals to
project scheduling. Project scheduling occurs during the planning phase of
the project. You have to ask yourself three questions to start:

1. What needs to be done?

2. When will it be done?
3. Who will do it?

Once you’ve got answers to these questions, then you can begin to plan
dates, link activities, set the duration, milestones and resources. The
following are the steps needed to schedule a project:
Define Activities
What are the activities that you have to do in the project? By using a Work
Breakdown Structure (WBS) and a deliverables diagram, you can begin to take
these activities and organize them by mapping out the tasks necessary to complete
them in an order than makes sense.

Do Estimates
Now that you have the activities defined and broken down into tasks, you next have
to determine the time and effort it will take to complete them. This is an essential
piece of the equation in order to calculate the correct schedule.

Determine Dependencies
Tasks are not an island, and often one cannot be started until the other is
completed. That’s called a task dependency, and your schedule is going to have to
reflect these linked tasks. One way to do this is by putting a bit of slack in your
schedule to accommodate these related tasks.

Assign Resources
The last step to finalizing your planned schedule is to decide on what resources you
are going to need to get those tasks done on time. You’re going to have to
assemble a team, and their time will need to be scheduled just like the tasks.

How to Maintain Your Schedule

Once the Project Is Initiated
Once you’ve got all the pieces of your schedule together, the last thing you
want to do is manually punch it into a static document like an Excel
spreadsheet. Project management software can automate much of the
process for you. But not all project management software is the same.

There are programs on the market that are great for simple scheduling
duties, but when you’re leading a project, big or small, you need a tool that
can adapt to the variety of scheduling issues you’re going to need to track.
Like noted above, there are three tiers of scheduling: tasks, people and
projects.
Scheduling Tasks
An interactive Gantt chart is crucial. You can add tasks and dates into your
Gantt chart to have a visual representation of each task’s duration. Better
still, as dates change—as they inevitably do—you can simply drag and drop
those changes and the whole Gantt chart is updated instantly.There’s also
automating processes to help with efficiencies. Email notifications are a
great way to know immediately when a team member has completed a task.
When they update, you know because your software is online and
responding in real-time.
Scheduling People
Over the course of a project’s lifecycle team members are going to take off
for holidays, personal days or vacation. If you’re not prepared for these
times, and have scheduled other team members to pick up the slack in their
absence, your schedule will suffer.

Integrating your calendar into a project management software is a simple

way to stay on top of your resources. There’s no reason to use a standalone
calendar that sends you to another application every time you need to check
on a team member’s availability.

Another way to stay on top of your scheduling is by integrating your task

scheduling view on the Gantt chart with resource and workload scheduling
features. You can schedule your team’s workload through color-coding, so
you know at-a-glance who is behind, ahead or on schedule with their tasks.
Scheduling Projects
The project dashboard is your best friend, whether you’re working on one or
many projects. The dashboard is collecting all the real-time data collected by
you and your teams, and then it’s organizing it according to any number of
metrics to show you a picture of where you stand in real-time on the project
or many projects.

With a project dashboard you can note where tasks are being blocked and
immediately adjust your schedule to resolve delays before they become a
problem. You can also use the graphs and charts the dashboard
automatically generates to drill down deeper and filter or customize the
results to get the information you need, when you need it.

And that’s just a fraction of what we could say about project scheduling. Our
ongoing series explains and explores new and relevant terms in project
management, focusing on a specific definition and summarizing what it
means for anyone leading a project.

Conclusion
Scheduling is one of the more difficult jobs in project management,
but coordinating delivery dates on your estimates can be
streamlined and made more efficient when you employ the tools.
From interactive Gantt charts, resource and workload management
that can be easily integrated to a real-time reporting dashboard,
you’ve never had a tighter hand on your project schedule.