Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

Finalizing the Project Schedule

The last schedule was built by the JPPS planning team. At that point, you knew the core team by name but the full project team by position titles only. Now that you have all of the named members of the project team, you have all of the information you need to finalize the project schedule. Team-member availability must be factored into the schedule. Such things as other project schedule commitments and non-project time commitments (department meetings, training, work week schedules, previously approved vacations, and so on) will impact the current project schedule.

Micro-level planning is another step in the decomposition of the tasks that are assigned to an individual. It involves a decomposition to what I call subtasks. In some cases, these subtasks may be a very simple to-do list or, in more complex situations, they might appear as a very small project network. Remember that you are dealing with tasks that have met the six WBS completion criteria and are therefore relatively simple tasks of short duration.

Micro-level project planning begins with the lowest-level task defined in the WBS. Because it appears in the WBS, it will have management oversight by the project manager. The responsibility for completing this task within a defined window of time will be assigned to a task manager (or team leader, if you prefer). The task may be simple enough that all of the work of completing it is done by the task manager. In more complex situations, a small ...