Project Time Management Process Plan

Project Time Management Process PlanProject Time Management Process PlanProject time management is one of the 10 PMP Knowledge Areas for project managers. Its the discipline of project management that looks at controlling the amount of time it takes to do the work. Here is a look at the project time management knowledge area from A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide) Fifth Edition. There are other ways of looking at project scheduling but if you are working towards your PMP certification then the PMBOK Guide approach is the one youll be following, and its good practice for all project managers too. Project Time Management Project time management in the PMBOK Guide is made up of 7 processes. The project time management processes are Plan schedule managementDefine activitiesSequence activitiesEstimate activity resourcesEstimate activity durationsDevelop scheduleControl schedule. Lets take a deeper look into each of those. Plan Schedule Management Th isstep is where you establish all the policies, procedures and documentation required for managing your project schedule from your first plan, ongoing development, execution and then controlling the schedule. The output of doing this planning is to produce a schedule management plan. However, in real life, you probably wont have a separate plan to manage your schedule. Much of what you work out here will end up in your project management plan and thats perfectly adequate. Define Activities This process identifies and documents what you need to do to produce the projects deliverables. In other words, it identifies the project tasks. Youll use the scope statement that you put together during the scope management activities to help you break down the work into individual tasks. The main output of working through this is that youll end up with a defined list of project tasks. Thats useful as its the main input to the next process. Sequence Activities Using your task list, now yo u have to put them in the right order. At the end of this process, youll have a view of the relationships between project tasks. This process helps you put your project work in the right order so that you can make efficient use of the projects resources and deliver as quickly as possible. The PMBOK Guide talks about producing a network diagram as the output of this process, but thats rarely necessary, and certainly, nothing that youd have to do by hand. If you want to do network diagramming for some reason, then use your project management software to do it. Ultimately, though, a list of dependencies and potential start and end dates for tasks will be just as good and less time-consuming. Estimate Activity Resources When you know what you are going to do, the next step is to work out what resources you need to achieve that. The Estimate Activity Resources process helps with that. In this process, youll work out what human resources, equipment, and supplies you need, plus the qua ntity you need of each. Estimate Activity Durations Thisstep is where the hard work of calculating how long each task is going to take happens. During this process youll work out how long its going to take to do each activity, using the resources that you have identified. Dont forget to take into account resource availability and holidays with your activity durations. Just because a task only takes 8 hours doesnt mean it will be finished by the morning. Develop Schedule Finally, you can now put together your project schedule. With all the information gathered from the above processes, it should be easy. Developing the schedule is one of the more complicated processes in the PMBOK Guide. There are 13 inputs (everything above plus risks, scope, and elements relating to the project context). The schedule itself is only one of the outputs, but the others are (in my view) less important. After all, youve gone through all of this to get the schedule which is a critical document fo r managing your projects performance. Your schedule doesnt have to be a Gantt chart. Here are 5 alternatives to Gantt charts for you to consider. Control Schedule Finally, the Control Schedule process gives you the tools you need to monitor and update your project schedule, making sure that changes are managed appropriately and that you keep control of the timings of your project. Preparing your project schedule and tracking it afterward are large pieces of work, but its worth it to know that you have a schedule that you can be confident about.