Missed Opportunity
I've looked through the recent PMI Practice Standard for Scheduling. Disappointing is the first word that comes to mind. But disappointing for several non-obvious reasons.
- The Practice Standard has little to actually say about the practice of scheduling. 2/3's of the document list fields that must be in a schedule. This list is interesting but hardly as important as the missing piece.
- This missing piece comes in the form of a question. A question that I've worked on for several years as a proposal writer, an IMP/IMS Program Management Architect and general handy man around large complex programs.
What does a credible schedule look like? What are the units of measure of credibility for a schedule. How would I recognize a credible schedule is I had one in front of me?
The Missed Opportunity
What's really missing is the guidance on how to construct a credible schedule. Listing the mandatory and optional fields in a schedule database and some simple rules about predecessor and successors, lags and leads, etc. does not provide guidance for building a credible schedule.
Good "architecture" for a schedule, starts with good architecture for the plan. Planning is different from scheduling. Planning is the creation of the condition for success for the project. It is synthesizing a sequence of actions (the plan) of actions that are capable of satisfying the goals of the project. In the domain I'm most familiar with (aerospace), the plan describes how the project will "mature" as a result of accomplishing activities. Not as a result of the passage of time and consumption of resources - but maturity increasing deliverables.
Scheduling is the set of activities that result in the maturity increasing deliverables and the temporal constraints on these activities.
Planning is a management function. Scheduling is the mechanical production of the sequence of work efforts needed to implement the plan.
The Core Problem with Project Management
Project Management wants to build schedules, not plans. It's a Plan that describes how the project will be successfully delivered. The schedule comes later. Without the Plan, the schedule is not very interesting to the person asking about the credibility of the project.
