Project scheduling is a crucial tool that reveals a detailed plan representing when and how it will deliver the results defined in the project deliverables and scope. Besides that, a project schedule also acts as a tool that facilitates communication among the project stakeholders while managing their expectations. Research also suggests that the scheduling of a given project acts as the fundamental basis promoting performance reporting (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE ) Sixth Edition”, 2017). Notably, all successful projects must have good performance indices. The schedule acts as a guide that supports the delivery of the project deliverables and scope and facilitates the evaluation of the delivered elements, thereby promoting performance reporting.
The project management team is solely responsible for selecting scheduling methods, whether the critical path method or the agile approach method. The selection of the scheduling method is then followed by the selection of the project’s specific data. The specific data is inclusive of the planned or allotted dates, the set activities, durations, allotted resources, project dependencies, and forecasted constraints (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE ) Sixth Edition”, 2017). These facets are all entered into the project’s scheduling tool, creating a viable schedule model for the specific project. The resultant product is the project schedule, as shown in Figure 6.2. The figure below reveals a project schedule overview revealing how various scheduling facets such as the scheduling tool, scheduling method, and the project outputs interact, thereby creating a viable schedule model. In smaller projects, processes such as the definition of activities, sequencing, estimation of activity duration, and development of the schedule model are often closely linked (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE ) Sixth Edition”, 2017). Therefore, they are mostly regarded as a single process since a single individual can perform them over a short duration. However, in the figure below, these processes are displayed as separate elements since the tools and approaches employed by each vary (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE) Sixth Edition”, 2017).
Figure 6.1 Example of a Project Schedule Overview
Retrieved From: (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE) Sixth Edition”, 2017)
“With high levels of uncertainty and unpredictability in a fast-paced, highly competitive global marketplace where long term scope is difficult to define, it is becoming even more important to have a contextual framework for effective adoption and tailoring of development practices to respond to the changing needs of the environment. Adaptive planning defines a plan but acknowledges that once work starts, the priorities may change and the plan needs to reflect this new knowledge” (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE) Sixth Edition”, 2017, p.177)
There are various trends and practices in project schedule management. These trends are often linked to the high prevalence of uncertainty and unpredictability in today’s global market. The Sixth Edition of PMBOK® Guide reveals that the high prevalence of uncertainty and unpredictability has made it increasingly difficult to define the long-term scope of a given project effectively. Besides that, the ever-changing environment has also made the contextual framework in scheduling particularly difficult, thereby necessitating adaptive planning when bidding to develop a project’s schedule. Therefore, some of the leading emerging practices in project management include iterative scheduling, usually linked with a backlog, and on-demand scheduling. On the one hand, iterative scheduling, usually linked with a backlog, denotes an emerging scheduling mode that predominantly employs adaptive life cycles (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE) Sixth Edition”, 2017). The main requirements of this emerging trend are usually documented in user stories. The stories are then prioritized and refined before the final construction of the final project schedule. One main advantage of this trend is the facilitation of several features that have a few interconnected dependencies.
On the other hand, on-demand scheduling employs a Kanban system whose basis is the theory of constraints and lean methods such as the pull-based scheduling methods (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE) Sixth Edition”, 2017). These approaches are all aimed at limiting the project team’s work that is in progress to balance the demand against their delivery throughput. In addition to that, the on-demand scheduling trend does not rely on a previously developed schedule (“A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: (PMBOK® GUIDE) Sixth Edition”, 2017). Instead, it selects various works from the project’s intermediate queue or backlogs, thereby facilitating their completion as soon as resources become available. The Project Management Institute, Inc. reveals that on-demand scheduling is employed for projects with evolving products within sustainable and operational environments and cases where tasks and the project scope are similar or can be bundled.
