Page 137 - Untitled-1
P. 137
116 PRACTICAL SCHEDULING
Rant and Rave Well, this won’t help the schedule. But sometimes you just have
to blow off some steam.
The Useful Schedule
In my travels, I have seen more bad schedules than I would like to admit. I have
seen schedules, produced by computers, which bore no resemblance to reality.
Sometimes this occurred because the developers of the schedules didn’t under-
stand what the computer did with the information that they supplied. In other in-
stances, the schedule was so badly manipulated as to make it impossible to
support and most difficult to update. In either case, the result of the scheduling
effort is completely useless and makes people resort to alternate means and docu-
ments to work with a more usable schedule. In the first case, training (see Chap-
ters 1.4 and 13.1) will help. In the latter case, the scheduler must avoid the
temptation to take shortcuts, by forcing dates, rather than defining realistic task
duration and precedence. Only after doing so can the override functions, such as
date constraints, ALAP modes, and dummy tasks, be used to modify and improve
on the schedule. A schedule, thus developed, is the only one that will contribute
to project success.
