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SECTION 3

SCHEDULING

To many people, project management is synonymous with scheduling. We
know that project management is so much more than that. Nevertheless, it
is scheduling that provides us with the foundation for many of the important
functions that are part of the project management process. Without the defini-
tion of the workscope, and the scheduling of the work, we would not have a ba-
sis for planning the assignment of resources or for managing the cash flow.
Furthermore, the timing of the work and the management of the project
end date are two of the most watched and sensitive areas of most projects.
So, without falling into a false sense that the schedule is everything, we must
recognize that scheduling is a very critical component of the project manage-
ment process.

In Section 2, we discuss the importance of defining and organizing the
workscope, and the value of developing a Project Milestone Schedule. These are
the initial steps toward the development of a detailed project schedule. It is cer-
tainly possible to develop the schedule without the use of the computer. But this
would be folly. First of all, in the manual approach, every time that you made a
change, you would have to redraft the schedule. Of course, you could use simple
bar chart software to generate a manually calculated schedule. This avoids the
complete redrafting of the schedule to incorporate changes. But it would not pro-
vide the benefits of task relationship planning—a key component of the critical
path method (CPM).

With the use of CPM software, you can define the tasks, their durations, and
their relationships and have the program generate a schedule. It is possible to im-
pose your will on what the computer does, by defining constrained start dates,
target end dates, interim milestones, concurrent work, and so forth. You can test
for options and alternatives (what-ifs). You can use the work breakdown structure
and other coding to select, sort, and summarize the schedule data. I could go on
and on about how useful, even necessary, critical path software is. In the chapters

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