Endangered: Saving Scheduling from Extinction

Dan is a globally recognized project analytics thought leader and software entrepreneur. With 20 years of experience and multiple highly successful Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software companies under his belt, Dan was the founder of Acumen (now part of Deltek) and is the inventor of Acumen Fuse, 360 and Acumen Risk.

  Estimating   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)   PM Network  

I’ve noticed a surprising trend during the economic downturn: Fewer capital expenditure projects were being sanctioned and funded, but the need for third-party assistance with schedule analysis and risk assessments actually increased dramatically. This phenomenon indicates a threat to the field of project management—the gradual extinction of the savvy project scheduler.

Available software tools are more powerful than ever. Although this software provides collaborative, web-based, multi-user capabilities, project managers still struggle to bring projects in successfully under the triple constraint of cost, time and scope.

Project management boils down to “planning the work” and “working the plan.”

Top-down planning

Critical path method (CPM) scheduling is the de facto standard for scheduling projects. Estimating durations, sequencing work and assigning resources are all common steps. Yet all too often, project managers who follow this method wind up with a plan that is either unachievable or unrealistic.

A major mistake is to jump straight into the development of the planned work rather than adopt a more formal, top-down approach that better establishes the work breakdown structure (WBS). Project managers should only detail out the work once they have defined the project objectives, elaborated the scope definition and …

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