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Most project managers know that creating the project plan is only the start of the project management journey. All the careful planning and forecasting don’t count for much if there isn’t a concrete way to execute the project plan. And with most projects having so many moving parts, creating a schedule that is actionable and takes into account all the realities of the project can become the most critical part of the project management process.  

What is Project Scheduling?

A project schedule is your project’s timeline, it consists of all the sequenced tasks, activities and milestones that need to be completed in a certain timeframe. 

Creating a project schedule is a way of communicating all the tasks that are needed to be performed, while clarifying what resources are needed, under what time frame. 

Effective project scheduling leads to the success of  a project, reduced cost, and increased customer satisfaction

Broadly speaking project scheduling consists of 3 steps

• Determine what needs to be performed
• Determine who needs to perform the work
• Determine how long it will take to perform the work.

Creating the Project Schedule

Even large, complex projects need to be broken down into smaller manageable tasks that have clear objectives and timelines. Creating a project schedule can be done by following these steps:

1. Plan Schedule Management: This includes all the groundwork involved in setting up a schedule. It consists of establishing all the policies, procedures and guidelines that will govern your project. It identifies all the stakeholders in the project management process, identifies who must approve the schedule and who has the authority to make changes to it.

2. Define Project Activities: This consists of all the activities required to be finished to complete the project. This involves clearly stating the nature of each task, what the subtasks under them are, and determining milestones to track the project’s progress along the way. Activities should be measurable, easily estimated and related to both a project deliverable and a budgeted cost.

3.  Determine Dependencies: Identifying dependencies involves listing down all the activities that rely on others to be completed. This helps you to structure your schedule based on which tasks need to be done parallelly and which need to be done sequentially.

4. Sequence Activities: After you have identified dependencies, you can begin to sequence the activities in a project. This does not involve assigning timelines to each task but involves creating an efficient workflow in which the order of the tasks is identified.

5. Estimate Resources: Every activity in your project requires resources. This could be in the form of personnel, software, workspace and much more. Estimating resources ensures that the optimal amount of resources are available at each stage of the project, so that you don’t encounter delays while executing your project.

6. Establish Durations: Accurately documenting how long each activity will take is key to ensuring the project as a whole stays on track. Underestimating how long a task would take can have cascading effects of the entire schedule, while overestimating how long a project will take can lead to the wasteful use of time and resources. 

7. Monitor and Control: This process takes place throughout the length of the project. It involves running reports and assessing the progress of a project against the schedule, managing performance, and communicating with the team.

Techniques of Project Scheduling

Project scheduling typically includes various techniques, some of the most common techniques are:

Mathematical Methods:

These models calculate the start and end date of various tasks in the project based on their known scope.

Critical Path: 

The Critical Path Method is a model that identifies the maximum and minimum required time to complete a project. It also helps to identify all the critical tasks that need to be completed in a project for it to stay on track. It also identifies other tasks in which the delivery time does not affect the schedule. CPM is implemented by listing down the tasks necessary for a project’s completion and noting the dependencies between them.

A critical path helps to visualize the project flow and calculate its duration when all dependencies and deliverables are known.

PERT Chart:

Just like a Critical Path Diagram, a PERT chart also helps visualize the task flow in a project and estimates a timeline based on their assumed duration. Like in CPM, you need to define tasks and order them based on project timelines. You can then create a network estimating different timelines of your project depending on various levels of confidence to create,

• Optimistic timeline
• Most-likely timeline
• Pessimistic timeline

PERT Charts use a weighted average duration to calculate possible timelines. 

Duration Compression

These are techniques to shorten a schedule, it is used to adjust the schedule without changing the scope.

Fast-Tracking

This is another way to use a Critical Path. It helps you to find tasks that could be done simultaneously or be partially overlapped to speed up the project’s delivery. By analyzing the Critical Path, you can identify which tasks can be fast-tracked.

Crashing

This is a technique where additional resources are brought in to complete a project on time. This can be used in unique cases where a project has extra resources to spare. It can also be applied to situations where simply adding more resources can speed up the completion of a project. This technique significantly increases the cost of a project.

Task List:

This is the simplest technique of project scheduling and involves creating a spreadsheet or document of all the possible tasks involved in a project. 

Gantt Chart

It is used by project managers most of the time to get an idea about the average time needed to finish a project. A project schedule Gantt chart is a bar chart that represents key activities in sequence on the left vs time. Each task is represented by a bar that reflects the start and date of the activity, and therefore its duration.

Tips To Master Project Scheduling

Input from Stakeholders: Creating a project schedule cannot be done in isolation. Consulting your team and other stakeholders allows you to identify tasks, resources and dependencies more accurately so you can estimate durations with realistic timelines.

Refer to Past Projects: Referring to previous projects with similar scope can help create a more comprehensive schedule with realistic estimates and a more exhaustive task list. 

Identify Risks:  Proactively identifying and documenting all the factors that could potentially derail your project allow you to create a risk management plan that could effectively mitigate risks if they occur without affecting the project schedule drastically. 

Record Scheduling Assumptions: Clearly define your reasoning for calculating an estimate. A large part of scheduling is making predictions, this involves making assumptions based on the current information available. Listing down these assumptions makes it easier to identify how  the entire schedule may change if some of your assumptions change along the way. 

Tell us About Your Experience with Project Scheduling 

Project scheduling techniques are constantly evolving. Do you have any experience with the implementation of project scheduling techniques, we’d love to hear from you. Tell us about your insights in the comments below.

2020 may have had other plans for all your goals, but a new year brings with it a blank slate and a chance to start afresh. As we re-center and look ahead, it’s important to set achievable and detailed plans to guide our new year goal setting process.

Setting lofty new year goals doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a way to get there. You need to find a way to create meaningful goals to focus your intentions. This ensures your team stays motivated throughout the year and doesn’t abandon their goals after a few weeks.

If goals are your rudder that points you in the direction you want to go, plans and processes are the oars that will actually get you there. Understanding the importance of goals and the techniques involved in setting achievable goals paves the way for success.

What is Goal Setting?

Goals can never be created in isolation, the context in which they are set and the plans around achieving them are what makes any goal useful. You can use goal setting techniques to give your organization long-term vision and short-term motivation. Concise goals allow your teams to focus on their acquisition of knowledge and helps them organize their time and resources in a more streamlined manner. 

5 Principles of Successful Goal Setting

Commitment: Commitment refers to the degree to which an organization is attached to a goal. You need to set goals that align with your core values, the closer the goals are to your core values the more focused they will be on achieving them. When teams are less committed to goals- particularly more challenging ones, there is a higher chance of them giving up. If your team is strongly committed to your goals they are more likely to do what needs to be done to accomplish them. 

Clarity: When a goal is vague it has very little utility. The most important task is to set precise and unambiguous goals that can be measured. Teams need to communicate with each other in order to achieve goals, so being able to talk about them in accurate terms allows them to better align themselves and carry out tasks more efficiently. 

Challenge: It’s important to set goals that are challenging yet attainable. Challenging goals can increase self-satisfaction and help teams develop new skills to achieve them. If a goal is unreasonably lofty then teams will develop a feeling of dissatisfaction and frustration when they are not achieved. 

Complexity: Finding the optimal level of complexity of your goals can be a challenge. Special efforts should be made to break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable tasks. Highly complex goals can become overwhelming for people. For such goals, people need to be provided sufficient time to work toward the goal, improve performance, practice, or learn what is necessary for success.

Feedback: Goal setting is more effective in the presence of immediate feedback. It allows teams to assess the degree to which their goals are being achieved and how they are progressing.

How to Get Teams to Set and Achieve Goals

Small Steps: Goals need to be broken down into actionable plans. The board, long-term vision should be laid out into attainable steps along the way.

Put Things Down: Writing down your goals helps you commit them to memory. Post them in a visible location to keep them top of mind. You can use online collaborative tools like Creately where team members can get together and review these goals, and add inputs and suggestions whenever they feel necessary.

Offer Incentives: Devising the right incentive structure can greatly promote dedication and commitment to achieving their new year goals.  The right incentives for each team will vary according to your team dynamic. Some teams work better when there is competition amongst members, other work better when the incentives promote cooperation.

Reward Success: A little bit of praise can go a long way. Recognizing and praising success is one of the best ways to reward a job well done. It’s best to do it amongst peers and can add a sense of validation to the efforts put in by team members.

Set New Goals Together: Getting teams together and setting goals as a collective is a great way to add a sense of ownership to the task at hand.

How Visual Tools Can Help

Visual goal-setting tools are a great way to formalize the goals for the coming year and serve as a common resource that teams can easily access and refer to.

SMART Goals

This tool allows you to structure your thinking and put achievable yet challenging goals in place. You can use this tool in the new year goal setting process. It allows you to finely and accurately define your goals and create concrete plans to accomplish them.

Specific: More clearly defined goals have a better chance of being accomplished. For a goal to be specific consider the 5 ‘W’ questions:

Who: Who is involved in this goal?

What: What do I want to accomplish?

Where: Where is this goal to be achieved?

When: When do I want to achieve this goal?

Why: Why do I want to achieve this goal?

Measurable: How do you measure your success once you have accomplished your goal? Use this tool to list down how you will measure progress and how you will know once your goal is achieved. 

Achievable: Answer tough questions like do you have the expertise, time, money, and resources to achieve this goal?

Relevant: A goal should relate to the situation you are trying to address. It’s important to consider whether achieving this goal contributes to significant business growth?

Timely: Your goals should have deadlines and they should be realistic. This will create urgency and energize you to get the work done without procrastinating.

Action Plans

Using an action plan allows teams to break down long-term goals into specific steps that need to be accomplished along the way. The template provides a visual representation of the new year goal setting process what needs to be accomplished. It lists important dates that need to be kept in mind and highlights what each team member’s responsibility is.

Objectives and Key Results 

Once the team goals are decided, the objective and key results templates help assign individual members with specific tasks. This ensures clarity and avoids duplication of work.

Visual Task Management

Goal setting is just the beginning. Organisational success depends largely on how effectively teams can organize themselves to execute the goals they have set for themselves. Using visual task management tools like Asna and Favro helps you keep track of the various aspects of your project and serve as a central hub where teams can track progress, identify delays, note dependencies, and much more.

Kanban Boards

Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. It enables you to optimise your workflow and can promote focus, boost visibility, and increase productivity. Visual details are displayed in a single place on a Kanban board, minimizing the time spent tracking down progress reports or sitting in status update meetings.

Scrum Boards

Scrum boards are a simple visualisation tool that helps teams plan and execute short, focused tasks that align with larger goals. It provides a daily recap of the status of individual tasks, the progress made and helps identify blockers that are in the way.

Gantt Charts

Gantt charts are a project management tool that teams can use to track the progress of a project and the work that is scheduled to be done on a specific day over the lifetime of the project. It can also help you view the start and end dates of a project in one simple Gantt Chart. It helps teams prioritize tasks and identify which tasks may be holding up others if not completed on time.

Have More Tips on How to Set Goals for the New Year?

Goal setting is both an art and a science. The key is to find techniques that work for your individual teams. You need to constantly track, adjust, and make improvements to the way you set and address your goals. This is what will keep your teams focused and motivated. If you have any goal setting tips that have worked for your team or plans on how you are going to implement them in the future, please let us know in the comments below.