Project Schedule Management Fundamentals

Study Notes

Project schedule management involves planning, executing, and controlling the project schedule.
Project schedule planning includes determining the policies, procedures, and documentation for managing the schedule.
Defining activities involves identifying the specific tasks that need to be completed to produce the project deliverables.
Sequencing activities involves documenting the relationships between project activities.
Estimating activity resources involves determining how many resources are needed to perform each activity.
Estimating activity durations involves estimating the work periods needed to complete each activity.
Developing the schedule involves analyzing activity sequences, resource estimates, and durations to create the project schedule.
Controlling the schedule involves managing changes to the project schedule.

Expert judgment, analytical techniques, and meetings are used to develop the schedule management plan.
The schedule management plan includes:
- Project schedule model development: Including estimated durations, dependencies, etc.
- Scheduling methodology and tools: Such as CPM, Network diagrams, etc.
- Level of accuracy and units of measure: Hours, days, or another unit.
- Control thresholds: Ex. ±10%.
- Rules of performance measurement.
- Reporting formats: The format and frequency of schedule reports required.
- Process descriptions.

An activity or task is a unit of work found on the work breakdown structure (WBS) with a cost, expected duration, and resource requirements.
Activity definition involves developing a detailed WBS and explanations to understand all the work that needs to be done, which helps to develop realistic cost and duration estimates.