Planning for Project Schedule Management

At its core, a project consists of two main components: the project work that needs to be performed and the schedule to perform that work. As you learned in the previous chapter, the overall project work, i.e., the project scope, is broken down into smaller manageable components. These components in the WBS are called work packages. However, a work package might not be a suitable item to assign to an individual to perform. So, work packages can be rearranged, or decomposed, into smaller components called activities. A project schedule contains not only the activities to be performed, but also the sequence in which the activities will be performed, along with a start and a finish date. The sequencing of activities is constrained by the dependencies among the activities. A realistic project schedule can be created from the bottom up by identifying the activities, estimating the resources for the activities, and determining the time that each activity will take with the given resources available. The schedule, once developed and approved, needs to be controlled to stay on track. All these tasks belong to what is called project schedule management These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.