Scheduling Tools

Here are some tools and techniques for combining these inputs to develop the schedule:

• Schedule Network Analysis - This is a graphic representation of the project's activities, the time it takes to complete them, and the sequence in which they must be done. Project management software is typically used to create these analyses - Gantt charts and PERT Charts are common formats.
• Critical Path Analysis - This is the process of looking at all of the activities that must be completed, and calculating the 'best line' - or critical path - to take so that you'll complete the project in the minimum amount of time. The method calculates the earliest and latest possible start and finish times for project activities, and it estimates the dependencies among them to create a schedule of critical activities and dates.
• Schedule Compression - This tool helps shorten the total duration of a project by decreasing the time allotted for certain activities. It's done so that you can meet time constraints, and still keep the original scope of the project. You can use two methods here:
  • Crashing - This is where you assign more resources to an activity, thus decreasing the time it takes to complete it. This is based on the assumption that the time you save will offset the added resource costs.
  • Fast-Tracking - This involves rearranging activities to allow more parallel work. This means that things you would normally do one after another are now done at the same time. However, do bear in mind that this approach increases the risk that you'll miss things, or fail to address changes.

Tip: Use of Project Stages: One of the biggest reasons that projects over-run is that the 'final' polishing and error-correction takes very much longer than anticipated. In this way, projects can seem to be '80% complete' for 80% of the time! What's worse, these projects can seem to be on schedule until, all of a sudden, they over-run radically. - A good way of avoiding this is to schedule projects in distinct stages, where final quality, finished components are delivered at the end of each stage. This way, quality problems can be identified early on, and rectified before they seriously threaten the project schedule.