Building Schedules
Maybe you have just been made Project Manager. That’s awesome!!!
How do you develop a good schedule? Watched some YouTube and read some very jargon laden articles? Good start and great initiative.
But no one is giving a simple explanation.
A few tips before I give a run through of what may work for you.
1. Let’s start with good and tweak it to great. Key is, get something down as a starting point.
2. Engage your team for help. And don’t just fall back on the experts. Get their input and lead the conversation. Don’t get frustrated if they have questions on top of yours.
Don’t wait until everything is perfect. It is truly the enemy of the good.
Now a process you can use.
- Get clear on your why. The business case and what the organization wants to achieve. Or just simply has to get done.
- Identify you’re stakeholders. Who’s requirements do we need to satisfy. And who’s will we not — but acknowledge we heard them still. NOTE: there will be many stakeholders that have ideas that they believe are an absolute must, that cannot be achieved. Don’t ignore them. Talk through with them the challenges or why it may actually be a different project that achieves what they want.
- Distill down (or decompose in PM speak) what you have into an initial round of activities. Engage some subject matter experts here.
- With your activities in hand. Boil those into tasks on a task list. Again get input and expertise.
- Estimate the time needed for each activity and task. Again experts. You as the PM don’t know it all.
- If possible, assign the type of expertise needed for each task. Not specific person necessarily, but what skills needed.
- Come together with your team and review it.
- Decide who and how it will be managed and updates.
- Revise as needed.
- Manage as decided. Adjust where needed.
Want more help? Give me a shout at chad@revivaldevelopmentservices.com and reference Medium and or LinkedIn schedule post.
