A couple of people mentioned they didn’t how project scheduling tools worked so I thought it was time to put together a beginners guide to project scheduling. This by no means qualifies you to use project management, it simply shows you how to use one of the tools that project managers use. This can be very helpful when dealing with complex projects in the workplace.
First of all, lets take a project that a fair amount of people would be familiar with. I’ve taken the purchasing and migration process from Windows to Mac as an example, because I felt that by putting this into context for some people, they may understand the actual tool and how we are using it a little better.
Here are a basic set of tasks I have put together for me to migrate from my windows notebook to a mac notebook. Normally in a project management context you would manage tasks in 40 hour packages (and could still easily have more than 5000 line items if it’s a large project) so my example is broken down to far more detail than a project manager would normally do (referred to as Micro Managing and generally considered to be a very bad thing) and you would spend more time managing your project plan than the project but this is just and example so here are our tasks in no particular order:
1. Order our BTO macbook
2. Install softare (vm, windows, office etc)
3. Move old files to Mac with USB drive
4. Sell PC on Ebay
This is how it looks in our project plan:
The next step step is typically where we take each task, look in more detail at what steps are involved in achieving that task (create sub tasks), and then try understand the time involved in each task. This is referred to as a WBS or “Work Breakdown Structure”. The time can fall into a number of components, first of these is effort or work and the second is duration. I.e. to install Office 2008 may take 5 minutes work, but may have a duration of 20 minutes because you can walk away from your machine and return when its completed. For purposes of this, we'll base it purely on duration rather than time.
1. Order our BTO macbook (10 minutes)
2. Install softare on BTO (vm, windows, office etc)
2.1. Old Machine
2.1.1. Install PST Converter (10 Minutes)
2.1.2. Convert PST to Mac format (30 minutes)
2.1.3. Install VM Converter (10 Minutes)
2.1.4. Convert Windows to VM (2 hours)
2.2. New Machine
2.2.1. Install VM
2.2.1.1. Install VM Software (20 minutes)
2.2.1.2. Install VM from old machine (10 Minutes)
2.2.2. Install Office 2008 (20 minutes)
3. Move old files to Mac with USB drive
3.1. Move converted PST file to Mac (10 minutes)
3.2. Move working files to Mac (3 hours)
4. Sell PC on Ebay
4.1. Format drive (30 minutes)
4.2. List on Ebay (10 minutes)
4.3. Ship to Seller (20 minutes)
At this stage already is where projects typically start to have problems because you have a project manager who is relying on experts to give advice and often the advice is not correct, for example, selling the computer on ebay wouldn’t realistically take that short, not because of the actual selling time (we’ll get to that later), but because its easy to skip tasks like packaging the notebook in foam which add another 10 minutes to the task. This is why planning is so critical on tasks (and yes, we missed a lot in the other tasks as well)
Now that we have a WBS, the next thing we have to do is understand the dependencies between the tasks and find out exactly how long this project should last. To do this, we use the predecessor field in your project management package to check which tasks have to be completed before each other, for example, you cannot move the converted PST file to your macbook before you have actually converted it. Once you have this, you can also identify your critical path (most Project Management packages will identify this for you). A critical path is always difficult to explain, but in short it’s a list of tasks on a project that cannot be changed without affecting the duration of the project. For example, if we have two task that can be done at the same time and have to be finished at the same time and one of them takes 2 hours, and the other takes 10 minutes, the 2 hour task would typically be on the critical path, because you can do the 10 minute task at the beginning of the 2 hour period, or at the end, and its up to you to decide when you feel like doing it. If you still haven’t done it by the time it gets to 10 minutes before the due date, then it becomes part of the critical path as well. In a project management context, you’ll hear people referring to these movable tasks with the terms “Early Start” and “Late Start” meaning what is the earliest we can start this task, and what is the latest we can start it before it becomes a critical path task. These can even be enabled as columns on your project plan.
When we start with dependencies, we immediately start to notice problems. For example, I can’t start installing software immediately after ordering the notebook, I have to wait 3 weeks for it to be delivered. The problem with this is that the task of ordering doesn’t take 3 weeks, so how do I reflect this “lag” in the project plan. The dependency field does cater for this lag. To type it in, you state 1FS+15 in the task that follows the first task. What this means is (1) the tasks number, (FS) Finish Start i.e. the previous task must finish before the next task starts, (+15) plus 15 working days. There are a number of variations to these but the FS option is probably the simplest for most people starting. In the case of our project plan, we can start work on the old notebook prior to the new one arriving, but realistically this wouldn’t be possible because you would want to convert your most updated PST file.
Once we add some dependencies, we get a project plan like this that shows us when we can start tasks. This shows the whole project.
And now zoomed into one specific area. The darker black line shows the path between critical tasks.
Now in the current scenario, this may not be important, but with a 5000 line item, 2-year project, knowing when to bring people on site is what costs or saves a company money. Bring people on site when they can’t start working yet and every day they are on site could cost $1500+ in consulting fees. Bring them on too late and you delay the project. Try to manage the start and finish dates of 200 people, along with costs, budgets, actual vs. projected and you start to understand why project management involves a lot of stress and a lot of long hours.
Now, these are the basics required to put together a project schedule, there is far more functionality in these tools, including budgeting, forecasting, more ways of handling dependencies, resourcing etc, but I won’t go into those for now as this will already give people something to play with. Easy ways to start with this is to try planning something you know well and then play around with things like dependencies to see what effect they have on the project.
