Project Management Scheduling
Project management scheduling is a core function of any project. What needs to be done is identified. Then the time each task will take is estimated. The order in which tasks must be done has to be determined, including tasks that must be done simultaneously although they may not all finish at the same time. Finally, a hard copy schedule is generated showing exactly when each task is to be begun and exactly when it is to end. All of that sounds simple, and it can be simple for small projects. But large project management scheduling is a complex thing.
Consider the thousands of tasks involved in a typical construction project. The building's design must be completed. Then architectural plans must be drawn up and bills of materials prepared from the plans. Purchasing agents must solicit bids for materials, then schedule deliveries at exactly the times when the materials are needed. Those delivery times, in turn, depend on other aspects of the project management schedule such as labor availability, the rate at which construction progresses, the weather (over which project managers have no control), and so on. A project management schedule must be flexible to avoid breaking down.
Various techniques have been developed for managing complex project schedules; PERT diagrams, GANTT charts, and critical-path analysis are some of the tools that project management scheduling employs. Project management scheduling software incorporates these and other methodologies. Project management scheduling is generally a subset of a complete project management software suite such as Project Kickstart Pro (a commercial product), or Open Workbench (an open source project management scheduling suite that is available free of charge).
Evaluating project management scheduling software takes time and attention to details. Get a hands-on test drive of the software in both new data-entry mode and in schedule-revising mode. Is it easy and quick to enter all the necessary data and generate a coherent schedule that can actually be met? More time is spent revising a project management schedule than is spent creating it initially.
How easy and fast does the software enable you to change one aspect of the schedule and see how that affects all other aspects? Does the project management scheduling software highlight critical paths, unworkable segments of a schedule, bottlenecks that must be monitored to ensure that they aren't delayed and thereby create many more delays in other parts of the project?