Keeping the Schedule on Track

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Quality   Schedule Management   Scheduling  

Project managers love their Gantt charts and detailed schedules. All of the colors (blue and red!) and the lines connecting everything together create a beautiful picture of the project. Then execution starts and tasks slip, the critical path deviates over and over, resources get reassigned, the contract changes and a million other things go wrong. The beautifully organized and orchestrated Gantt chart begins to look like an overgrown garden with weeds choking the critical path until the project comes to a dead stop.

If the schedule only exists to track what happened, it is a fairly useless tool. It will be glad to talk to you about the project and tell you how horrible things are, but that is not what project managers need. What they need is a schedule that will sooth them when things go wrong and show the project manager a way to navigate out of the thorns and bristles, and get back to the peaceful garden of a well-tended project. The schedule is a tool like anything else that project managers use, and if it is used correctly it can help keep the project on track for a successful finish.

Alternatively, a project manager could print out a poster-sized copy of the schedule that can be rolled up tightly--allowing them to hit people over the head with the gantt chart. But that, in fact, may not be the best approach to using the schedule to help the project team. Here …

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