There are plenty of ways to go about project scheduling while managing a project. Each organization/expert/project manager has their own opinions on what constitutes a well-built schedule. Regardless of these various outlooks, the primary concern should always be: “Is the schedule executable?”
The above gap will always lead to challenges in the integrity of the PMO's/Programme's overall project schedule
Below are the key challenges that Project Managers/PMO face with the quality and efficiency of their schedules -
Extensive time spent on maintaining and adjusting the project schedule
Lack of what-if and so-what analysis while preparing/modifying a project schedule
improper development of a Work Breakdown Structure
Inefficient estimation techniques while assigning task durations
Scope creep or over-promising project outcomes
Inconsistent use of tools/techniques and lack of understanding of scheduling principles by end users
Not enough resources to complete the tasks
So how can you actually manage these challenges? Below are some tips you could use to control the quality of your schedules:
Validate, Challenge, and re-validate your task/resource estimates
It's a best practice for Managers/Project Managers to challenge, validate, and re-validate the estimates provided by their team/SMEs and not lean towards an assumption of trusting the team in all cases, blindly. They can use PM techniques like PERT, Critical Path, and Monte-Carlo, or leverage Socratic questioning to drill down into timeline estimation. It is always best to leverage historical data with well-defined WBS to cross-question and attain more confidence in the estimates provided by the sources
Resource Levelling for Project Scheduling
Resource and capacity is usually the biggest constraint in project planning and completion. Resource leveling is the optimization of work allocated to each team member in each time period with respect to the total resource hours available. It is helpful to see if anyone has too much to do or is under-resourced.
Try leveraging resource leveling charts to analyze the work balancing between different resources and thereby understand where you need to give breaks vis-a-vis where more work needs to be assigned. You may find out that even with reallocating work between team members you still can’t get it all done with the people you’ve got. Further, this data will give you ample evidence/stats to go to your sponsor and ask for additional funding.
Develop a dynamic schedule for improved structuring
A dynamic schedule is not just a fashionable term. Nor is a schedule dynamic just because it was created in a scheduling tool like Microsoft Project. Finding the dependencies between the tasks and entering them into your schedule takes considerable effort - which is why it might not always be the best strategy; for instance, if your project is just a limited number of tasks, then maybe the standard rigid schedule is just fine. However, if your project effort is a bit more complex then you can expect many changes to occur - which in turn will need you to change the schedule to reflect the new reality. The static model will make it messy to make all changes in the schedules and dependencies, while if dependencies are set in an efficient way, you won't need to make as many changes. This will save a lot of management time as well as avoid risks
Provide customized organization-specific training on tools/templates/best practices to PMs and end-users
Each organization has its own way of working as well as internal assets/tools which may be customized to its own needs - which is why it becomes highly imperative that all its resources, project managers, and even stakeholders are aware of all nooks and crannies of the specific tools/templates/best practices. This helps avoid conflicts and misunderstandings related to internal documents
Monitor, update, and audit your schedules regularly
Despite the difficulty, project managers should do their best to update schedules in real-time to bring accuracy and avoid confusion by providing relevant data to the team. If you have a shared tool/technology and the team has the training to use the same - it's best to ask the team to update the schedule as and when they complete a task or observe a risk.
One of the major challenges you may face is when you have a team of SMEs who want to make progress and deliver excellent results, schedule updates may seem like an unnecessary overhead - in such cases you could either do weekly/defined frequency updates by setting a separate time with the team to go through the plan, dates, making sure milestones reflect reality, running schedule reports, and communicating progress to the stakeholders. Frequent updates make it an easier task as compared to doing it all at once after a month.
Lastly, avoid complicating the project schedules
At times, project managers/business leads also tend to over-complicate and set a lot of deadlines on tasks which makes the schedule complicated and less agile. It is best to avoid the temptation to set too many deadlines on tasks as well as avoid using too many specific date constraints on tasks.
Further, people also tend to create low-level predecessor/successor task relationships between even the summary tasks which usually ends up being futile (as Change is the only constant) and makes it difficult while managing projects/schedules to keep a track of the same. As a best practice, you can also avoid assigning resources to the summary tasks - rather assign a high-level task to a group/a particular person