Schedules: The Muscles of Project Management
I was waking up with my sweetie on a lazy Sunday morning and she asked me, apropos of nothing, what project management tools and techniques had been most important in my life.
I’m not going to pretend this is our usual pillow talk, but we’re both pretty geeky. Her favourite book? Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface by Lars Müller. There’s always a copy on her desk. It’s one among many of the reasons I love her.
I answered the question the best I could[1], it being able to identify and manage the critical path of a project: that part of a schedule if delayed by one day the entire project is delayed by one day (or more). Being able to identify “the long pole in the tent”, that part of the project that has the biggest positive or negative effect on meeting deadline is important.
On any big enough/complex project, knowing what your critical path is takes some work. First you have to define what all the work is, and be able to estimate its cost, duration, and effort (money & time). Which you are familiar with from the Work Breakdown series.
That’s just the start. Now you can put the work in order (sequence) it, identify what outputs are inputs for other work (dependencies), and then can you start to actively engage with and manage the completion date (using critical path analysis and other techniques).
Along the way you’ll learn about milestones (tasks with zero cost or duration, but they help tie things together), network diagrams (how to order work), and timelines (where several threads of work are happening at the same time). Even if you’re not a project manager, understanding what the project manager you’re working with/for is talking about will give you a leg up in your contribution to the team.
This all makes a “schedule” (a list of work and dates) different from a “schedule” (a sequenced network of estimated work with beginning and end dates), something you can actually use to track progress, forecast completion, shift resources, identify and mitigate risks, and make decisions. All the practical, actionable things we mean when we say “manage”.
You read all all the way to the end. Might was well:
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[1] To be fair, she’s missed a minor deadline the night before – did all the work but didn’t hit the send button before falling asleep. Who among us hasn’t woke with a start, remembering something left undone?
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