Page 150 - Project+

such as running electric lines for overhead lighting before setting countertops or

mirrors. Because they have been involved in other projects of similar nature, they
use expert judgment to provide you with duration estimates for their tasks and
provide a rough order-of-magnitude estimate for the plumbing work. You all agree
that the work should be estimated in workday increments.

Once all the work of the project is recorded on the schedule, you assign resources
and calculate the duration of all the critical path tasks, and you find that the
project will take 120 days to complete.

Creating the Project Schedule

Creating the schedule involves all the work you’ve done so far, including defining the
tasks, sequencing the tasks, and determining duration estimates. You will now plug
this information into the schedule and establish a start date and a finish date for each
of the project activities. Let’s walk through an example. Your project involves painting

a house. One of the tasks is scraping the old paint off the walls. Another task is
applying the new paint to the walls, and another task is painting the trim. You really
shouldn’t apply the new paint until the scraping is finished. That means the scraping
task is a predecessor to the painting task. And the painting can’t start until the scraping
is finished (an FS relationship). You know from the experts providing estimates for
these tasks that the scraping task will take two days and painting will take five days. If
scraping starts on Wednesday, June 1, scraping should end on Thursday, June 2. All

day June 1 and all day June 2 are spent on scraping. That means painting can start on
Friday, June 3. The painters work on Saturday but not Sunday. If this is a five-day task,
painting will finish on Wednesday, June 8. The total duration for these two tasks is
eight days (including the Sunday the painters don’t work).

It may take several iterations to get the schedule finalized. Once it’s approved, it serves
as the schedule baseline for the project. Once you begin the work of the project, you’ll
use this baseline to track actual progress against what was planned.

Before creating the schedule, let’s revisit milestones and how they interact with the
project schedule.

Milestones

Milestones are typically major accomplishments of the project and mark the
completion of major deliverables or some other key event in the project. For example,

approval and sign-off on project deliverables might be considered milestones. Other
examples might be the completion of a prototype, functional testing, contract approval,
and so on. A milestone is typically denoted on a project schedule as an event that is
achieved once all the deliverables associated with that milestone are completed and it
has a duration of zero.

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