You can see from the lengthy project plan we ve created that your schedule and budget are going to be challenging to develop. Once you ve created your WBS, you can look through your task details and begin developing your schedule. The schedule is best developed in a project management software program since you will have a lot of moving parts to handle. If you have subteams working in parallel on different aspects of the project plan, be sure you address this in your schedule. First, you ll have to be sure you re not double-booking someone and throwing your schedule off. Second, you want to keep an eye on how different segments of the project will impact other segments so you don t end up working at cross-purposes, or worse, damaging something another team just implemented. If one team is upgrading the firewalls and another team is working on IPS, it s entirely possible one team s work will greatly impact the other team s work and cause confusion, problems, errors, or omissions.

Be sure to check your critical path tasks after you ve loaded your schedule into the software program, since these tasks will determine the longest, least-flexible path through your project. Although we haven t discussed the more technical aspects of scheduling (we assume you know them), recall that you can indicate lead and lag times as well as float to create a more realistic schedule. If everything in your project plan ends up on the critical path, or if none of your...