BUS605: Strategic Project Management

As you learned in the previous lesson, a project plan is a high-level view of the project that roughly maps out how to achieve the project's ultimate goals, given the available time and resources. In living order, a project plan is provisional and open to revision as you learn more about the project. A schedule is a specific, time-based map designed to help the project team get from the current state to successful project completion.

You can think of a project plan as similar to a football coach's strategy for winning a particular game, which might, for instance, include ideas for containing a highly mobile quarterback, or for double-teaming an exceptionally good wide receiver. By contrast, a schedule is all about tactics; it is similar to the specific plays a team uses to ensure that the right players are in the right places on the field at the right time. A team will know some of these plays backwards and forwards after endless practice; other plays will be the result of adaptation and inspiration as the game unfolds. In the same vein, in living order, a schedule typically requires regular adjustments to account for the changing realities of the project.

Above all else, a schedule is a form of communication with everyone involved in the project. The attention of project stakeholders is a scarce resource. Therefore, you should strive to make your schedule worthy of your team's attention. It's important to shape a schedule to the team's needs and strengths, and to your organization's culture. A good role model for this type of flexibility is the jazz and classical musician Wynton Marsalis. When he is performing Mozart's Trumpet Concerto in D with a symphony orchestra, he follows the strict rules of the classical music world. When he plays bebop at Lincoln Center, he switches to the free-form, improvisatory style of the jazz world. In the same way, as a project manager operating within living order, you need to be aware of what is and isn't appropriate and useful for your particular project and organization throughout the life of your project.

In all cases, it's essential to include the right amount of detail ­– neither too much nor too little. You should start by identifying key milestone dates as hard deadlines ­– the most important of which is the final delivery date. Those dates are often set in advance by other stakeholders and cannot be changed. Then build a schedule that provides paths to meeting those deadlines. If, as you build the schedule, you realize that meeting those deadlines is not possible, then you may have to adjust milestones and project completion dates.

Starting with the most important milestone, delivery date, and then building the schedule backwards, can help ensure that plans don't get squeezed at the end. It is not uncommon for people to start out with a generous schedule for the first few activities and gradually get more aggressive with timing as they run up against the delivery date. The immediacy of the first activities means that people are more realistic about timings, whereas future activities get planned with more hope than knowledge.

Sometimes it's helpful to start with the deadlines you want to meet, and then create a schedule that fits those dates. This can be a useful exercise that helps you understand the scheduling challenges you face, including identifying the project milestones. It's also a good way to figure out what parts of the project you need to reevaluate and adjust.

It's also important to tailor a schedule to match the project's overall complexity and time requirements (for example, whether deadlines are hard or soft). Projects are not equal in terms of complexity and criticality. This means that the type of schedule that works for one project may not work for another.

You can choose from a host of software possibilities for generating schedules, such as MS Project. Whichever one you use, take care not to get so lost in the details of building a schedule, and interacting with the software interface, that you lose sight of the project goals as expressed in the project plan. Always keep in mind the project's definition of success as expressed by the stakeholders, as well as the overall plan for completing the work. A good project manager is able to cross the bridge from the generalities of a project plan to the specifics of a schedule, without losing sight of the big picture.