TABLE OF CONTENTS The aim of this chapter is to give you an understanding of what aplan is and some practical guidance on how your schedule may be created and statused during thelife of a project.
A project is essentially a set of unique operations or activities to be completed in alogical order to achieve a defined outcome by a definitive end time. A schedule is an attempt tomodel these activities, their durations and their relationships with other activities. Theseactivities take time to accomplish and may employ resources such as people, materials, equipmentand 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 theWBS.
Assign to activities their durations, predecessors, successors and constraints and thencalculate the start and finish dates of all the activities.
Assign resources to the activities and calculate the planned project resource requirements.
Monitor the actual progress of activities against the original plan and revise the plan whenrequired.
Monitor the consumption of resources and re-estimate the resources required to finish theproject.
There are four modes or levels in which planning and scheduling software may be used.
| Planning | Tracking | |
|---|---|---|
| Without Resources | LEVEL 1 Planning without Resources. | LEVEL 2 Tracking progress without Resources. |
| With Resources | LEVEL 3 Planning with Resources. | LEVEL 4 Tracking progress with Resources. |
As the level increases, the amount of information required...
