Scheduling In Project Management Essay

Scheduling Techniques in

Project Management

- Akshay Suresh Rao

ASSIGNMENT 1 (INDIVIDUAL) – PART 4

Scheduling plays a vital role in the success of the project. Without scheduling, you do not know what is happening within the project and if you are on track for success or leading towards the pit for failure. Hence, lot of emphasize is given on scheduling of the project. It aids the project manager in multiple folds. It helps Project Manager manage the Cost of the Project, take decisions regarding the scope or time change within the project looking at all the activities scheduled. Scheduling also helps project manager to sync-up with higher management and provide a status update on the health of the project. A good schedule can eradicate the

Using this you can keep keen eye on activities that trigger start of other activities. Delay in those might lead to delay in the overall project.

• As the projects become more and more complex and huge in the number of activities, it becomes more difficult for the project manager to keep track of all the activities. Critical Path comes in very handy at these times, since project manager can focus on the critical activities and the rest would be more or less be taken care of.

• It also helps maintain the efficiency of the project.

• We can estimate the completion time of the project using this method and can reduce the factor of uncertainty by considering both the shortest and longest time calculation for the critical path.

• Critical Path Method provides a complete overview of the entire project and helps get everyone aligned on the project.

Like most of the techniques, Critical Path Method also has some

Two main types of Compression techniques used are: o Crashing: Under this, we include addition al resources and infrastructure to support the activity and complete it at a faster rate. Hence, reducing the time needed for this activity. o Fast Tracking: Under this, we try to run activities in parallel even if they are dependent on each other. This might some times have impact of the quality aspect of the activities since things are being done in parallel when they should be done sequentially based on the dependency.

We have used both the Crashing & Fast tracking concept in our Option 1 & Option 2 recommendations for the project in the earlier pages.

Many of the limitations mentioned in the Critical Path Method especially related to Resource can be handled well with the other techniques mentioned here.

Although all of these project-scheduling techniques are very useful and present the entire data in a very presentable format for the project manager and other stakeholders, it is very critical that these be coupled with the other project management techniques to make it a successful