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Chapter 9: Optimizing the Schedule

By Eric Uyttewaal
From Dynamic Scheduling With Microsoft Office Project 2003: The Book by and for Professionals

Overview

After entering the schedule data, we now have a dynamic model of our project that tells us whether the project is feasible as we envisioned it. In most situations, the draft schedule will show that the duration is too long, the cost is too high, the workloads are unreasonable or any combination of these. With a dynamic model, we can easily develop and explore different scenarios to find the best solution. We can optimize for time, for time and cost or for time, cost and resource availability.

After reading this chapter you will:

  • be able to choose the appropriate approach for optimizing

  • be able to optimize the project for time (including scope and quality)

  • be able to display the Critical Path

  • be able to solve a fragmented Critical Path

  • understand the difference between Free Slack and Total Slack

  • be able to apply several techniques to shorten the project duration (optimize for time)

  • be aware of the assumptions/shortcomings of the Critical Path Method (CPM)

  • know what Monte Carlo simulation is and why you would use it

  • be able to optimize the project for time and cost

  • be able to optimize the project for time, cost and resource availability

  • be able to make workloads and over-allocations visible in MS Project

  • know how to level the workloads of the resources yourself

  • know how to level the workloads of the resources automatically

  • know what the Resource-Critical Path is and when it is important

  • be able to find and shorten the Resource-Critical Path

  • be...

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Topics of Interest

The Pulling Forces Optimizing a schedule is the true art of scheduling. When optimizing, you have to consider the project in all its aspects. The Project Management Institute has identified the...

Checks on the Optimized Schedule Here are checks to verify if you have applied best practices when optimizing your schedule. Optimizing Workloads Is the total effort within the person hour...

Optimizing for Time The three dimensions that we will consider in this type of optimization are quality, scope and time, as indicated by the solid black arrows in the illustration. When you try to...

Overview With the tasks, estimates, dependencies, constraints (and deadlines) entered, we now have a Gantt Chart that is a dynamic model of the project. You could stop here if resources, their...

Optimizing for Time and Cost When you optimize for time and cost, you should consider the dimensions scope and quality as well. In the illustration, we are adding cost as the fourth dimension in our...