BUS605: Strategic Project Management

Scheduling is a phase of project management that necessarily blends geometric and living order. Sometimes you need to hew to a predetermined order of activities on a tightly regulated schedule; sometimes you need to allow for the flexibility required when one activity is dependent on another activity of uncertain duration and complexity. In a true geometric order situation, you'll likely spend more time planning upfront than updating later. In living order, the opposite is true. Generally speaking, in a geometric order, push environment, 60 percent of effort might go into planning, 10 percent into scheduling, and 30 percent into updating and revising the schedule. In a living order, pull environment, those percentages shift, with 30 percent of effort devoted to planning, 10 percent to scheduling, and 60 percent to adjusting and refining the schedule.

The planning and scheduling technique most closely associated with push planning and the geometric order is the critical path method (CPM), which is a "step-by-step project management technique for process planning that defines critical and non-critical tasks with the goal of preventing time-frame problems and process bottlenecks". You can use CPM to identify impacts of proposed changes to the timing and duration of tasks. The key to CPM is identifying sequences of connected activities, known as paths. The critical path is defined as "the series of activities which determines the earliest completion of the project".

The scheduling technique that best exemplifies living order principles is a pull schedule created collaboratively by stakeholders, typically by using multi-colored Post-it notes. Details of this type of scheduling have been codified in the Last Planner System, a proprietary production planning system, based on Lean principles, and developed by Glenn Ballard and Greg Howell. Agile also makes use of pull scheduling techniques.

Although protecting the critical path is important in these types of living order scheduling, explicitly identifying and monitoring the critical path throughout the entire project may be less of a concern. We'll explore why that's true later in this lesson. First, let's look at the basics of CPM. Then we'll discuss the details of pull scheduling and consider ways to combine push and pull systems to achieve the ultimate goals of Lean: creating value and eliminating waste.