Schedule Management Plan in Project Management

The process of creating a schedule management plan influences the success of the project from many aspects. As always, stakeholder expectations are an invaluable target to meet here. As a project manager, you have to communicate with stakeholders about the scheduling approach of your project. Therefore a comprehensive schedule management plan will be very helpful. In projects that you manage or participate in, the project management team, your stakeholders or customers will naturally want to be informed about the time interval that your project will be completed. 

According to this very common expectation of your stakeholders, you can make an estimate by analyzing the technical characteristics of the project, examining the scope of the project, meeting with your project team and contacting expert opinions, going into the details of the WBS. As a project manager, you may have to deal with some projects that may have predetermined end dates that you must comply with due to some time constraints put forward by your client, senior management, or stakeholders.

What is a project schedule management plan according to PMBOK?

The schedule management plan is a subsidiary plan of the project management plan. It simply guides the project team to develop a schedule, control schedule, manage and execute it. A project management plan illuminates the roles and responsibilities of all these tasks. It defines a schedule management approach. As you see it is a thorough guide to schedule management. In PMBOK 7, schedule management plan is used in the planning performance domain. 

What are the components of the schedule management plan?

The schedule management plan usually includes

  • The methodology determined for developing the project schedule,
  • The necessary project management methods which will be used while developing the schedule,
  • The specific software to develop and control the schedule,
  • The rules for evaluating the project's performance in terms of schedule,
  • Reporting formats,
  • Roles and responsibilities,
  • Acceptable deviations from the original plan.
We break down the schedule management plan into the following components:
  • Project schedule model development: This identifies any existing organizational scheduling methodologies as well as scheduling tools that will be used to develop a project schedule.
  • Level of accuracy: This identifies how accurate the final schedule will be. It's essential to determine the desired level of accuracy for the schedule.
  • Units of measure: How will the length of activities we measure in minutes hours days weeks or months? This identifies the desired unit of measure that will be used in organizational procedures.
  • Project schedule model maintenance: This identifies how the schedule is revised and updated. Once the project moves into execution control thresholds think of this is where we start to panic this section identifies a threshold that indicates when corrective action needs to be taken.

How do you write a schedule management plan? 

Inputs of the plan schedule management process

Project Charter: Since the project launch document contains summary information about almost the entire project, it is very useful to receive it as input in most processes. In this process, it can be useful because it includes a summary part of the project. In addition, milestones contained in the startup document are very valuable to evaluate in terms of time. In some projects, the project launch document may include units of measurement and tolerances that will be used throughout the project.

Scope Management Plan: The schedule is directly related to the scope. Therefore a scope management plan will be needed as input. 

Development Approach: The methodology and the approach for creating the schedule are very much related to the process

Organizational Process Assets: In the preparation of the schedule management plan, there will be a necessity to refer to organizational process assets. Whether your organization has previously implemented similar projects or the previous experience of your important stakeholders will determine the extent of the issues you need to address. If the case is conducting a unique project with all aspects without any similar predecessors, in which your organization does not have enough knowledge, the predictions about the uncertainty and assumptions about the duration of the project will be much greater, and the proximity of the forecasts that you will make will decrease. 

Enterprise Environmental Factors: By using EEF, organizational structure and culture, team resource availability, useful commercial databases can be reached.

Tools and Techniques of plan schedule management process

Alternative Analysis: This tool will be helpful to decide which of the development lifecycles, and methodologies for the success of the project. Decisions like scheduling tools, scheduling methodologies, resources, and duration estimation should be taken by using alternative analysis.

Expert judgment: People with experience in this area will be useful for the project. These people can be other project managers who carried out similar projects before, members of PMO, and schedule experts outside of the organization.

Meetings: To share opinions with the project team, stakeholders and other related parts meetings are useful tools.
 
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Comments:
1- Planforv 25.05.2021
Thanks for your elaborated work, Schedule management plan is the leading document to be followed in the knowledge area. Generally a gantt chart is used for creating a project schedule. If you visit my website you can see more related documents, schedule management templates, and examples.