Basics of Scheduling

A project schedule is the most important arsenal for the manager to deliver a successful project. It serves as a map of the route from project start to finish. It is a convenient form for monitoring and controlling project activities.

Scheduling essentially involves the following:

Identifying the tasks that need to be carried out,
Estimating how long they will take,
Sequencing them on the project's time line,
Allocating resources who will work on them.

Identifying the tasks: This is the first step and requires you to define the tasks, milestones, and other activities needed to complete the project. A useful aid to accomplish this is to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). The WBS is a hierarchical decomposition of all the work in the project into manageable chunks. Creating this provides a better understanding of the work needed to complete the project.

Estimating: Once you have laid out all the tasks, the next step is to estimate how long they will take. There are a number of factors need to be taken into consideration when building estimates, such as supply and demand of each resource and how it relates to your specific project, any external client commitments that need to be honored, and the sheer nature of the work.

Sequencing tasks & allocating resources: The next step is to start putting these activities & their estimates in order. A Gantt chart is a simple and quick way to outline the entire project. You can group logical activities, create dependencies between tasks, and exhibit their relationship to each other. Finally allocate the resources who will actually perform the work in those activities.

This becomes your project schedule that combines project milestones, task durations and relationships.