There are many platforms for project-scheduling available, and they are powerful and effective. However, it helps to have some experience with entry-level scheduling techniques before you move on to the big leagues. We’ll start with the basics and then introduce some complexity.
Scheduling with a Calendar
Much like the budgeting example from How to Plan a Project, you can either start with the “start date” and work forward, or you can begin with the “due date” and work backward. If there is a deadline you need to determine if it is possible to accomplish the project in time. If not, you can list the necessary steps, estimate the time each step will take, and count the days to see when you might finish. Some projects can be speeded up in order to meet a deadline; others cannot. Sometimes a deadline can be extended; sometimes it’s better to scrap the project if the deadline can’t be met.
Like budgeting, you will start with your best guess and then refine your schedule as you get more information. If you have followed the procedure in How to Plan a Project you will have already captured some of your scheduling notes. For this example we will use planning a move from an apartment to a new home. It’s a small enough project to use a simple calendar format for scheduling.
Here’s an Example
Buying your first house is exciting, and usually takes at least thirty days to close escrow—often as much as sixty days. You don’t want to pay any more rent than necessary, so you want to create a schedule that captures each step needed for a successful move. We’ll start with the significant dates and fill in the details within that time frame.
Escrow is supposed to close in 45 days, which is on a Wednesday next month. Print the two (or possibly three) full calendar pages for the months between now and the date you get possession of the house. It can help to use colored highlighters to help you see your schedule at a glance. Use a pencil to begin creating your schedule; things often change at this stage. Highlight the date you want to complete the project—let’s say you want to move the weekend after escrow closes on Wednesday, October 20th. That would be Saturday, October 23rd. You can’t move until you own the home, so highlight October 20th as well. We’ll call that date a milestone.
What else is essential for moving, once you own the house? You can stay there with no furniture, or even before the power is turned on, but you can’t really move without a means of transporting your furniture. Reserving a rental truck or a moving service is in your critical path; in order to move from your apartment to the house you must have a truck. Put “reserve a truck” on your calendar and do it as soon as possible, especially if your move date is around the end of the month. If you can’t reserve a truck for the day of the move you probably can’t move on the scheduled end date.
The consequences for missing a deadline vary according to the project, and for some projects the consequences can be dire. For other projects it’s no big deal. Understanding what’s at stake is crucial for a Project Manager, and if you are not the only stakeholder you might be missing some important information. If you give notice to your apartment landlord that you are moving and there is no new tenant lined up you might be able to stay longer by just paying an extra month’s rent. If the landlord has rented to a new tenant you are contractually obligated to leave, and you might be facing legal consequences if you have not vacated the unit on time.
We’ll assume you were able to reserve a truck and a moving crew early in the planning process. So far your critical path is looking good. Now we’ll look at some of the other things that you would like to include in your project, such as replacing the carpet in your new home before you move in. It’s not exactly on the critical path—you could re-carpet after you move in—but you have a few days between close of escrow and your move date, so you check with carpet retailers and find a company that has the product you want in their warehouse and time on their schedule to install it on the days you request.
This is great, but now you are relying on another party to meet your deadline. Put the carpet installation date on your calendar. If it will take two days to complete, draw a line with your felt pen to highlight both days. Be on the alert for changes from the carpet company. It could be appropriate to confirm their schedule a few days before the installation date.
There are other tasks to include, such as setting up your internet service provider, putting the utilities in your name, getting homeowner’s insurance, and filing a change-of-address form with the Post Office. It may not matter much what order you do these tasks in as long as they are all done by your move-in date. You can add them to your schedule on whatever day you want them done, but always look to see if any of them affect your critical path. For example, you will need to be sure that the power is on before the carpet installers show up, and the prior owners may have turned it off on the day they moved out (a week before close of escrow).
So far you can see your schedule at a glance by looking at the calendar pages you have marked up. If there are only one or two items per date you can evaluate, review, and occasionally change things and still see the big picture. Many projects have been scheduled successfully using this method—for more complex projects you might need a bigger calendar format (like an oversized white board in your office) but it was enough to keep track of your tasks, critical path, and important milestones. However, project management has gained some more sophisticated tools, and many of them are available as software. Let’s look at how these tools evolved and what they can do today.
The PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) Chart
The PERT Chart was designed to show the flow of a project with dependencies. In our example above, the carpet installation is dependent on the close of escrow. You need to finish the foundation before you can build the house.
The foundation is in the critical path for completing a house—unless you can figure out a way around that sequence. Manufactured home builders do just that; they build the frame in a factory and transport it to the foundation when the foundation is ready. They are both required components, but the dependencies are shifted. You don’t need to finish the foundation to begin framing the house. For a site-built house they are dependent.
The PERT Chart uses specific shapes to denote the milestones, and connecting lines to denote the tasks. This type of chart was developed in the 1950s by the Special Projects Office of the U.S. Navy, and were so successful in helping multiple offices track complex, interconnected projects that they became widely used in many industries. They are similar to a CPA (Critical Path Analysis) chart, which tracks a project from start to finish and shows the milestones that must be completed along the way. You can buy furniture for your new house but you can’t move it in until you have been granted possession of the property. For a large project, like building the Apollo 11 rocket, the CPA or PERT chart will become complicated very quickly. It’s an important tool, but it lacks the capacity to track other important factors.
The GANTT Chart (named after Henry Gantt, who introduced it over 100 years ago)
A GANTT Chart uses horizontal bars to represent the tasks. The length of the bar is proportional to the length of time the task will take, and shows the milestones (dependencies) and overlaps among the project tasks. One advantage of the GANTT Chart structure is that you can use a basic spreadsheet to set one up. For a modestly complex project that has multiple people involved it can be a helpful tool. For a more complex project you will probably want a more robust product, such as Microsoft Project.
Make Your Own GANTT Chart
To make a spreadsheet to visually track a project with a Gantt Chart format you can start by deciding what is the smallest increment of time you want to track (typically days or weeks). Decide how long the project is expected to take, and create that many columns (labeled to identify the time span, such as “week 1,” “week 2,” (or the actual dates, which is probably more useful if you know when the project will start and end).
The rows of your spreadsheet are individual tasks or milestones that can be tracked on the timeline. The visual image of the date and duration of each row tends to trend from left to right, and you can use other standard tools to manipulate the display (such as hiding rows that are not relevant to a particular meeting). A Gantt Chart created in a spreadsheet program can be especially helpful if you want to create a quick visual for other participants, and can be updated as the project progresses.
Project Management Software
If you are managing a larger project it might be time to get software that is designed for that purpose. You already know some of the things that you want to track, such as dates, durations, dependencies, and milestones. What about spending? Scheduling workers? Dividing tasks among multiple teams? The classic program for project management is called Microsoft Project. You can see an introduction to this program here. There are other programs available, many of which are specialized for a particular industry. We’ll cover them in greater detail in a different post.