Effective Project Management

Section J Planning and Scheduling

People don't like to plan it's much more fun just to do and the nice thing about just doing, is that failure comes as a complete surprise. Whereas, if you have planned, failure is preceded by a long period of despondency and worry!

John Harvey‐Jones

The WBS provides the building blocks for planning the project. Planning is a group process wherein the team thrashes out the relationships between the work elements in order to determine How the project is to be executed. The addition of the inputs required by the work packages/activities and the outputs produced relates the work elements to each other for integration into a detailed network. With the addition of time estimates (using the best available data), the network can be analysed to determine When activities need to be performed. The sequence of activities with no spare time is the critical path.

Scheduling, on the other hand, is the mechanics of creating individual tabulations. Schedules are derived from an analysis of the network to produce lists of work/tasks for the various disciplines.

1 Getting Organized

1.1

As project manager you must be familiar and reasonably competent with the planning/scheduling system being used.

1.2

Given enough guidance, a better‐than‐average planner can rough out a first pass plan from an equipment list, a plot plan, and some flowsheets and come up with an end date. It won't be the date everyone wants, but it's a start.

1.3

Prepare ...