Key Concepts We Learned From Chapter 7

Chapter 7   Realistic Scheduling

1. A successful project relies on a good planning. To ensure a good plan for the project management, we need to follow key steps in developing the detail plan: (1) Create the project definition; (2) Develop a risk management strategy; (3) Build a work breakdown structure; (4) Identify task relationships; (5) Estimate work packages; (6) Calculate initial schedule; (7) Assign ad level resources
2. In identify task relationships, one has to set right sequence or priorities for various work packages. In addition, we should specify the sequence and concurrent constraints for the task relationship. The task relationship should be defined only between work packages, and it should reflect only the sequence constraints between work packages, not the resource constraints.  Proper milestone should be set so as to effectively track the beginning, progress, and finishing of the project.
3. To manage the cost and schedule of the project, one has to build a cost and schedule estimation for each work packages through a bottom up estimating. The cost estimation will include the estimation for labors, equipments, materials, and fixed price bid. The labor estimation should get down to more precise estimation with given work durations.
4. Calculate an initial schedule is a very tedious but important technique. It provides a set of detailed schedule for every work packages. One can use the forward pass to determine the tasks with early start and early finish, use backward pass to handle the late start and late finish dates, and calculate float to address the flexible tasks. To effectively arrange the work packages in the work flow, careful analysis should be conducted to find the critical path for the project with help of Gantt Chat and time scaled networks.
5. Assign and level resource will provide a good optimization for the use of people and equipment. The leveling will rely on four basic process steps: (a) forecast the resource requirements throughout the project for the initial schedule; (b) identify the resource peaks; (c) delay noncritical tasks within their float at each peak; (d) Eliminate the remaining peaks by reevaluating the wok package. One can get help for modern project management software.