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Date
Last time in my post,
PMBOK® Guide for the Trenches,
I discussed scope. Now, I'd like to cover some basic truths about schedules that project managers need to know, but won't find in
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide).
One vital truth that the
PMBOK© Guide is clear on is that scheduling is only one aspect of effective project management, along with scope, cost, risk, communication, procurement, human resources, quality and integration.
But you won't hear that from professional schedulers--no, no, no.
It's often believed that the central tenet of project management is the ability to resource-load a schedule baseline into one of the more robust software packages that perform critical path analysis.
This is part elitism and part what I refer to as "black box syndrome." Project team members are led to believe that if a certain software package is fed all the data it needs, then the push of a button will deliver all the management information needed to successfully complete a project.
This, of course, is hokum, but I've seen it in many a project management office.
On the other side of the coin, it's a fundamental truth that you cannot manage a schedule with a list of milestones or action items, no matter how elaborate that list may be.
What tends to happen with action item lists or databases is that they essentially turn into, , polls and polls are not legitimate management-information systems. With a poll, there's always someone who has more recent information or more complete information than what's in "the system," rendering the data there unactionable.
Note that I said the data in the system. There's a profound difference between data and information.
Legitimate management-information systems process data into information using some kind of methodology. For schedules, this method is critical path. And it's a safe conclusion that there is no legitimate schedule management without critical path.
For serious project work, a critical path network is absolutely essential. This no doubt contributes to the phenomenon of schedulers thinking critical path management is all that is essential in project management, with the other stuff kind of ancillary.
I'm looking forward to everyone's comments.
Posted
by
Michael Hatfield
on: February 15, 2010 01:28 PM |
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