Tips for Keeping Your Schedule Updated
Project scheduling is a critical part of being able to deliver your project on time and on budget. Setting up the schedule is only the beginning. Once you have your project timeline created in a tool that meets your clients needs, such as Primavera P6, then you have to keep it updated.
Keeping your schedule updated can feel like a time-consuming task, especially if it something your team is not used to doing. Using new software can make it tricky to track the work – and then you need to know what to track as well.
If you are going it alone, here are five tips for keeping your schedule updated.
Tip #1: Leads and Lags
Take a look at the schedule and make sure that you can justify leads and lags. A task has a lead if the following tasks starts before the first one finishes.
A good schedule should have no tasks with leads (which you might know as negative lags) because that could impact on the flow of work through the project and the critical path. There might be some cases where it is appropriate to start a task early and carry out the work in parallel (or overlapping) with a successor task. As long as you can adequately justify where your tasks appear like this on the schedule, that’s fine.
A lag is a delay between one task finishing and the successor task starting. Again, there could be a good reason why there is a gap between a task ending and the next one beginning. For example, you may have allowed a two-week gap for a client to review a deliverable before changes begin. However, you should be able to explain all the points on the schedule where this happens to make sure they are intentional waiting periods instead of scheduling errors.
Tip #2: Progress
When it comes to scheduling, most people think of it as a way to track that planned work is actually happening. That’s why it’s important to check progress is being accurately recorded.
Talk to the team and establish whether there are tasks that have not yet been updated. If you use automatic timesheet integration that updates tasks to reflect hours worked, make sure that data is pulling through (and that everyone has submitted their timesheets).
Check that the work is happening as forecasted and use your earned value management reporting to identify trends in performance. That data will give you useful insights into what might be sliding off track so you can step in early to correct it.
Tip #3: People
Look through the tasks and make sure that there are individuals assigned to every activity. This step is actually more than checking a task has a name against it. You should look to see what proportion of time is allocated against this work and then review the resource profile of the project.
Check who is over-resourced and will have too much to do. Then apply resource levelling techniques to smooth out the work, or find additional people to help on the task so that no one becomes a bottleneck.
Tip #4: Other resources
‘Resources’ also means the equipment or materials required to do the project, and money. Make sure your schedule reflects the dates that materials and machinery are needed so that everything arrives on time.
Check every task has an appropriate budget and this is referenced back to the work breakdown structure and work packages.
You won’t have to do this for every task every week (or whatever review period you choose). It’s most relevant where tasks have changed since the last review, for example new work has been added or a task itself has been amended. Part of the skill in schedule reviews is knowing which tasks to look at to save time.
Tip #5: Earned Value Management Reports
Take a look through the EVM data produced by your enterprise project management software. These reports help you identify early trends and warning signs that can signal the project is going off track. Use the actual and forecasted information to make better decisions about how to manage the work. For example, if you spot that the Schedule Performance Index is only 0.85, that means the project is only running at 85% efficiency. You would want to look at ways to claw back another 15% to run at planned efficiency, as well as consider options to make up for the time already lost.
Our expert schedulers find this kind of interpretation comes naturally to them and they quickly start looking for practical ways the schedule can be reconfigured or changes can be made to allow the work to get back on track as smoothly as possible.
These five checks for keeping your schedule updated are a good starting point, but they aren’t everything you have to do to keep your schedule aligned to the work and accurately reflecting project progress. If it all feels a bit much, did you know that you can outsource scheduling to an expert third party? That’s a service we provide so that you can focus on delivering the project.
Get in touch to find out how we can help take the burden of timeline maintenance off your shoulders with our scheduling services.