TABLE OF CONTENTS The aim of this chapter is to give you an understanding of what a plan is and some practical guidance on how your schedule may be created and statused during the life of a project.
A project is essentially a set of unique operations or activities to be completed in a logical order to achieve a defined outcome by a definitive end time. A schedule is an attempt to model these activities, their durations and their relationships with other activities. These activities take time to accomplish and may employ resources such as people, materials, equipment and money that may have limited availability.
Planning and scheduling software allows the user to:
Break down the project into products or deliverables under a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
Break the project down into activities that are entered into the software under the WBS.
Assign to activities their durations, predecessors, successors and constraints and then calculate the start and finish dates of all the activities.
Assign roles and or resources to the activities and calculate the planned project resource requirements and costs.
Monitor the actual progress of activities against the original plan and revise the plan when required.
Monitor the consumption of resources and re-estimate the resources required to finish the project.
Provide the cost to date, cost to complete and other cost performance data as required including Earned Value reports.
There are four modes or levels in which planning and scheduling software may be used.
| Planning | Tracking |
|---|
