Project Management Step by Step: How to Plan and Manage a Highly Successful Project

Step 3.5 Build the plan into a schedule

The schedule is the start and end dates for each task, and from that the start and end date for the overall project. The end date is simply the start date plus the effort (in reality it is more complex than this – but this will do for now). The start date is determined by:

• When any predecessor tasks are finished (and do not forget external dependencies)

• When the people who are to do this task have completed previous steps they must work on

• When the people who do this task are available (i.e. not weekends, not holidays, not doing other non-project work). This is easiest if everyone is 100 per cent on the project (see the end of this section for further points on this).

Building on the example in Table 3.5 ...