Deep Dive: Project Schedule Management: Develop Schedule

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by Elizabeth Harrin

A blog that looks at all aspects of project and program finances from budgets, estimating and accounting to getting a pay rise and managing contracts. Written by Elizabeth Harrin from RebelsGuideToPM.com.

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Categories: Scheduling

I’m working my way through the Knowledge Areas and process of the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, and at the moment we’re in Project Schedule Management. Last time I looked at the Estimate Activity Durations process. That means today is the turn of Develop Schedule.

Develop Schedule Process

This is the fifth process in the Knowledge Area. We’re still in the Planning process group – although this is the last Planning process for this Knowledge Area. Finally, after what seems like ages of gathering data, we are now in a position to actually create the schedule.

Unsurprisingly, the main output is your schedule. There are some other outputs too, and we’ll come on to those, but the schedule is the biggie.

Inputs

There are quite a few changes to the Inputs between the PMBOK Guide® -- Fifth Edition and Sixth Editions, and as we saw with the last process, it’s mainly items being removed.

This time we’ve lost 11 specific documents. These have been replaced with the generic Project Management Plan, project documents and agreements.

Agreements refers to documents from third parties that talk about how they will do their tasks. You could use contract schedules for this, or a statement of work. I think agreements should also refer to the arrangements you have with line managers to use their staff on projects. Getting this firmed up will help massively with being able to build a schedule because you’ll be confident that the people you need are available to you.

As we’ve now got ‘project documents’ as a handy catchall, it might be useful to clarify exactly what they could mean. Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of the documents you could refer to during this process:

The activity list and activity attributes as you need them to build the schedule
The assumptions log
The basis of estimates, an output of the previous process that will help you determine contingency for the schedule
Task duration estimates (another output from the last process)
Documents relating to team members that will help you schedule e.g. resource calendars and requirements
The risk register
The lessons learned register (from previous projects – you probably haven’t learned any useful scheduling lessons yet given you haven’t delivered any work yet).

Tools & Techniques

There are only a few tweaks to Tools and Techniques.

Critical chain method is out and data analysis is in. Data analysis covers things like ‘what if’ scenario planning and other simulation techniques. These are great if you have software that can do them, but the majority of non-multi-million dollar and major infrastructure projects will probably have to manage without.

Resource optimisation techniques has been renamed resource optimisation.

Scheduling tool has been replaced with project management information system.

And we’ve got a nod to Agile with Agile release planning.

Outputs

The only change to Outputs is the addition of change requests.

Change requests pop up in other processes, so this could be a standardisation improvement. You can see why change requests are relevant here. If you are making changes to the schedule that might affect the scope baseline or other elements of the project management plan. It’s all part of being integrated with project management and using the processes as appropriate throughout the project. If you need to make changes, go through the change control process and document what is decided.