Why is good scheduling that important?

Scheduling your project

“In project management, a schedule is a listing of a project’s milestones, activities, and deliverables. Usually dependencies and resources are defined for each task, then start and finish dates are estimated from the resource allocation, budget, task duration, and scheduled events. A schedule is commonly used in the project planning and project portfolio management parts of project management.” – Wikipedia

The schedule generally shows in a timetable how to proceed in a project and what exactly needs to be done in the work packages. It precisely describes the timeline where the single work packages are processed and when the intermediate targets (the so-called milestones) should be reached.

What should a schedule look like? 

schedule

If you think of a schedule in project planning, you automatically visualize a GANTT chart that is the most common label here. The blue bars here represent the work packages with their content and a clear start and end point. The diamonds between are the milestones, i.e. intermediate targets within a project.

Why do I need a schedule? 

As already mentioned above, the schedule is a timetable that controls what should work how in the project; thus we can concretely derive following aspects:

  • The schedule determines a specific start and end date
  • The schedule allows to control and monitor these dates from a project controlling’s perspective.
  • The schedule enables corrective action in case of deviations, i.e. to make certain decisions.

Creating a schedule 

Create structure 

First of all, it is about structuring the planned project in a clear manner, i.e. entering the single work packages in the time line and adding suitable milestones.

Transfer to planning tool 

Make work packages smaller and break down into activities 

The smallest units of work packages are activities. They describe every single work to be done in the schedule in great detail. This ensures rather error-free work or process sequences resp. makes it possible to identifiy errors quickly.

Create and plan your projects with KLUSA right now

KLUSA Enterprise

The main contents and tasks of a project are handled in the KLUSA schedule. This hierarchical work breakdown structure (WBS) includes projects, subprojects, work packages, milestones, and associated activities.

Functionalities that support you to create your schedule in KLUSA

  • Use the automatic work package and templates for your rough planning
  • Use standard milestones to simplify your project planning
  • Also assign resources to work packages in the schedule
  • Read more in the project management data sheet.