Planning your project
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expediting and purchasing administration; training; inter-site travel and communication; updating project file records.
Suggest that each key stage owner draws up a complete list of tasks, and then produces a responsibility chart for each key stage. Then he or she can estimate the durations of all the tasks in the key stage using the same techniques as before. With the key stage owner, identify the actual people who will carry out the work and confirm their commitment and availability. When you identify resources, remember to review: • • • • • •
their previous experience; their individual capabilities; their technical knowledge; the accuracy of their work; their speed of working; their capacity to do the work.
Use the same techniques as before to derive the logic diagram for all the tasks inside each key stage. Then determine its critical path and the total float available in the tasks. Some of these tasks may be assigned milestone status later. This enables you to produce a Gantt chart for each key stage. As the project continues, you develop a complete family of such charts that are all expanded views of the primary or overall key stage Gantt chart. In this way, a detailed plan of the work for a particular part of the project is clearly defined by the people doing the work, and it minimizes misunderstandings about responsibility. At the same time, these people can confirm: • • •
that the work can realistically be completed on time; resource capacity and availability; the commitment of the line manager(s) to providing resources.
You now have the data to update the WBS. However, another advantage of this method is that the detailed work of a key stage does not need to be derived until a week or two before the work starts. This allows the planning to incorporate any unexpected outputs from earlier key stages. In this way you continuously work to hold your plan dates, seek the required resources and optimize your schedule to meet the total project time desired.
OPTIMIZING YOUR SCHEDULE The schedule is always based on the calendar, taking into account the nonworking days during the project. Before attempting to optimize, review