When teaching/learning project management, how do you structure your Project Schedule? By Phases or by Deliverables.

George -

I teach what I practice so WBS by deliverables ideally, and schedule chronologically which usually means by phase.

Kiron

When teaching, I think picking between one of the two is a flawed approach. Explaining the overall schedule and phases provides context. The deliverables are why we care about context. It's like providing an overview before diving into the details.

WBS/ Schedule
Level 0 = Project Name
Level 1 = Project Phases
Level 2 = Deliverables by Phase
Level 3 = Activities

Kiron Thanks, my main concern is the project schedule which is what I finally needs them to understand.

So your answer is to ideally manage the project schedule by phases, is this correct?

A quick visual representation of your scope in terms of WBS always helps .

The PMBOK says WBS should contain all of your project scope and having a WBS makes sure that "work does not slip through the cracks" .

Once you have , with the teams help, determined all the work to be achieved through WBS, you can break it into activities and then develop the schedule based on activities.

And yes , nothing stops you from having an overall MS Project schedule split by project phases because every phase will have scope items and work packages from the WBS that can be further decomposed into activities.

If you are running Agile then you can break down the project scope into user stories and run them through the sprints. You can represent the sprints in an MS Project schedule, should you have a requirement to do Management reporting . But this kind of sprint schedule will just be blocks of time . You really maintain your sprints and your user stories and your backlog within a software like JIRA

Hi George

Putting myself in a PM Student's shoes, I would create a skeleton schedule based on Project Phases [Initiation, Planning, Execution, M&C and Closure] and try to fit in the work packages from the WBS into each phase. For example, thinking traditional waterfall , I would need my requirements document and design to be completed in the planning phase.

scheduling by phases will give me a start date and and end date [or an approximation] for my project.

I said to organize it chronologically which might mean by phases, but monitoring & controlling it doesn't necessarily mean looking at just the next few weeks of activities - a PM needs to apply system thinking to their projects...