Project Scheduling
This chapter discusses making the transition from project planning to project scheduling by introducing two techniques, push scheduling, also known as the CPM method, and pull scheduling, also known as agile scheduling. Both have distinct advantages and disadvantages.
Focus on Milestones
One way to avoid getting lost in a sea of details is to focus on your project's milestones, which can serve as a high-level guide. You can use pull planning to identify your project's milestones, and then use critical path to figure out how to hit those milestones. It gives a reality test to whether your milestones are in fact achievable. Then you're off and running, in living order.
In an excellent blog post on the usefulness of milestones, Elizabeth Harrin explains that milestones should be used "as a way of showing forward movement and progress and also show people what is going on, even if they don't have a detailed knowledge of the tasks involved to get there. In that respect, they are very useful for stakeholder communication and setting expectations". You can use milestones, she explains, to track your progress, focusing on
- The start of significant phases of work
- The end of significant phases of work
- To mark the deadline for something
- To show when an important decision is being made.
Milestones are especially useful as a form of communication on the health of a project. A version of a project schedule that consists only of milestones allows stakeholders to get a quick sense of where things stand. As you'll learn in Lesson 11, you'll also want to report on milestones in the project's dashboard, which should serve as an at-a-glance update for the project.