A mantra of all successful people is; if it is not on your schedule it’s not doable for you. The same goes for your project timeline.
A kind of project timeline or specific formal plan for the project is called a project schedule. It explicitly explains what will happen and when it will happen. This is not just a plan made against time and resources but a holistic view of all the project activities. A project schedule address three fundamental things;
What needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and who will be responsible for it?
This article will run you through the making of a professional-level project schedule for your successful project.
Get Your Hands-On Project Goals
The number one concern of any project manager is to assess what needs to be done under the project? Once determined these goals become the business blueprint for all the next steps. For preparation purposes first of all the pieces of a project must be assessed and taken on the board. This step is the requirement affirmation step in short words.
Then depending upon the requirements gathered a manager will generate policies, procedures, documentation for the project. Yes, you heard it right that resources are also estimated in this step. Then the 3 pillars; requirements, goals, and resources are aligned in the array. When it comes to requirements, stakeholders must go hand in hand.
Without having all the needed stakeholders onboard, project goals are hard to define. So this step also involves the requirements gathering from all the potential stakeholders.
Define Tasks, Functions, And Milestones
At this stage, enough information has been gathered to define the tasks needed to be done for the successful completion of the project. Defining the activities, functions, and specific tasks is the need of the project because based on them all the milestones will be covered.
Furthermore, these tasks and functions will be working breakdown structure and aligned in such a way that they make a tunnel. towards closure. These predefined tasks will define the estimation, execution, required actions, monitoring, and scope of the overall project.
Get All The Tasks To Line Up
You are at a stage where all the requirements have been assembled and all the tasks required have been defined. Now the time is to align them all and make a fine-crafted diagram containing the tasks, functions, activities, and requirements.
This will help you define the route of different tasks like task A needs to be done before tasks B and C. Building a relationship between the tasks and their timelines is a core need at this stage.
Here comes the help of a project scheduling application/software or tool which will help you define and make relationships between the tasks visually.
Define The Needed Resources For Your Project
This is the time to locate the needs of resources between the tasks. Not every task is the same, that’s why the resource requirements of each task will be different. People, budget, tools, equipment, arrangements, and many other resources required at each stage of the project are defined at this stage.
For this purpose just assess the needs of each task and define its resource requirements thoroughly.
Make A Fair Estimation Of Each Activity
What would be the duration of the tasks defined and planned? When the task will close and the next one will start. This stage is to answer such questions. Estimating the duration of each task will ultimately lead to the estimation of the whole project’s length and timeframe.
Because the length of each task is needed to be aligned with resource availability, budget constraints, and many other project-based requirements.
Determine The Path Of Each Task – From Start To End
This stage is also known as defining the critical path of each task. There must be multiple ways of doing a single task but being in the most favor which path should be opted? By the widely used method, the critical path method it is easy to determine the starting and ending point of each task with the use of minimum efforts and maximum outputs.
As the critical path is the longest possible route of the task, therefore, estimating it provides a cushion to projects’ sneaky deadlines.
