Project Management in Practice, Fourth Edition

Chapter 5. Scheduling the Project

Consider the job of planning a project, developing a budget for it, and scheduling all of the many tasks involved. It should be obvious that these three activities are not actually separable. Because a budget must include both the amounts and timing of resources received or expended, one cannot prepare a budget without knowing the specifics of each task and the time period(s) during which the task must be undertaken. Similarly, the project plan implies a schedule just as a schedule implies a plan. It is useful to begin study of these interdependent, partial descriptions of a project with an examination of the planning process because this process is the foundation of all that follows. The decision about whether to turn our attention first to the budget or the schedule is arbitrary. We chose the budget largely because most readers have some familiarity with the subject. The problem is that planning, budgeting, and scheduling are parts of the same basic process. They are considered separately only because we cannot write about all three at the same time.

The project schedule is simply the project plan in an altered format. It is a convenient form for monitoring and controlling project activities. Actually, the schedule itself can be prepared in several formats. In this chapter, we describe the most common formats—Gantt charts and PERT/CPM networks—and demonstrate how to convert a project plan or WBS into these formats. We also note some of the strengths ...