Four Steps to a Basic Project Schedule

Whether you are leading a church picnic committee or a $500 thousand project, a basic project schedule is a must for effective leadership. For professional project managers, this may be second nature, but for the new project manager or for someone thrust into leadership for the first time, there are four basic steps to creating a project schedule that will help you to achieve your objectives.

1. Define the Tasks

Either by yourself or with the people on your project team, come up with a list of tasks that will need to be performed. Be thorough. You want to make sure each task is captured in your schedule. In general, if a task takes more than one week, it should probably be divided into subtasks.

List all of your tasks in one vertical column, leaving space to the right for other information. You may want to try to sort the tasks chronologically, but this is not necessary in your first pass. There will be time to sort them later to better reflect the progression of the project.

For large projects, it may be easiest to divide the tasks into three to five high-level phases. For example, in managing a software development project, you might divide the tasks into: Design, Development, Testing, and Deployment. Using categories like these will help you to think through each phase to make sure you are not missing tasks.

2. Relate Dependencies

With your tasks listed in one column, identify tasks that cannot be completed until a previous task is completed. This is called a dependency. The task depends upon the completion of one or more previous tasks.

You can represent dependencies simply with lines that interconnect the tasks you have listed. For larger projects, lines may become too confusing. In this case, consider numbering each task. If a task is dependent upon another task, list the number of the tasks on which it depends to the right of the task.

With your dependencies defined, you can order the tasks in your list so that they more closely follow the dependencies. For example, if task B is dependent on task A, put task A before task B in your list. This is not always possible, since task may have complex interrelationships that are not easily defined in a linear, sequential list. Just make it close enough to be understandable.

3. Assign Owners

With the tasks and dependencies identified, it is very important that task owners be defined. You may want to write the name of the task owner to the right of the task and dependency information. Be specific. Assigning a task to a group often means the task will not be completed. If a group needs to complete a task, ask one person from the group to be accountable to the project team for the task.

If any of the task owners do not participate in creating the schedule, make sure you check with them first on their availability and willingness to own the task. Putting their names on the project plan will not automatically get it done. Collaborate, communicate, and follow up with each task owner to make sure he or she understands what it means to complete the task.

4. Estimate Effort/Duration

With the tasks assigned, ask the owners to provide an estimate. Having the owner estimate the work will provide greater accuracy and will help the task owner to think through and own the task more completely than if you decide on an effort or duration.

What type of estimate should be provided, effort or duration? This is a great question.

If you are working with a predefined budget of hours or dollars, effort will be more important, since it allows the person to be spread across multiple projects, but only charge your project for the amount of time spent on it. Effort helps you with hours spent on the project, but not necessarily with meeting deadlines.

If you are working with more of a date driven schedule, duration will be more important, since this allows task owners to commit to dates, knowing what other commitments they have. In other words, durations are based on the deadlines, not the amount of hours spent.

This is an important distinction. Make sure whichever you choose to use, that you are consistent for all tasks in your schedule. If you mix them together, you will not be sure of what you are committing to.

Note: For experienced project managers using software like Microsoft Project, it is easy to combine effort and duration by allocating a percentage of a persons time to a defined duration. For example, you can define that a task will take five days to complete with Sam allocated at 20%. This means that Sam will meet his deadline by completing the work in five days, but he will not spend forty hours to complete it. Instead, he will spend 20% of 40 hours, or 8 hours. This is important if Sam is responsible for work outside of your project.

Take Aways

If you have not created a project schedule up to this point, start out by following the steps above in a spreadsheet, like Microsoft Excel, with the following columns:

• Task number
• Task description
• Dependencies
• Owner
• Duration

If you are accustomed to using Microsoft Project, how do your steps match with the ones listed above? Are there any you are missing?