From the course: Project Management Foundations

Make a realistic schedule

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Make a realistic schedule

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- [Instructor] It's important to make your project schedule realistic so tasks occur as close as possible to the dates you planned. One way to build reality into your schedule is to estimate task duration based on the hours people work on the project each day. People don't work a hundred percent of their time on project tasks. People don't even work a hundred percent of every workday. Things like staff meetings, paperwork, training, and time off, chew up work hours. Even walking across campus uses up work time. So do your best to estimate the number of hours people typically work. Another dose of reality is adjusting estimated task hours based on how fast the assigned workers are. For example, if someone is a whiz at getting computers connected to the network, you can change the task work hours to reflect her productivity. Third, to keep people productive, assign resources to work on no more than three tasks at a time. Switching between tasks means a person has to switch focus and that introduces a small delay each time. When resources are in demand and you have to assign them to several tasks, adjust those assignments to reflect their decreased productivity. When you make adjustments like these, add a note to your schedule to document the change and the reason why. That way you'll know what to do if other changes come up in the future. The closer you model your resource assignments to reality, the easier it will be to keep your project on time. Complete the assignment exercise in the exercise files to practice assigning resources to tasks.

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