3 fundamental truths about scheduling that every project manager should know

One of the most important things in a project manager’s skill set is knowing how to create impeccable schedules. As the saying goes, time is money, and when it comes to project management, success is defined first and foremost by whether or not a project is on schedule. Staying on schedule is even valued over being on budget in most cases. Here are three fundamental truths every project manager should know about scheduling. 

Your finish date is determined by your critical path 

While arbitrarily picking a finish date is possible, it’s forcing a project to meet a date. Schedules using the critical path to develop timelines are more reliable and less optimistic. Schedules tend to run over, you see, partly because of an optimistic bias. When someone, usually management, picks a finish date, the people building the schedule have a constraint that they have to work towards and the information may be skewed to try and make that date possible.

Using the critical path to determine the finish date method allows the project manager to understand the most important events and tasks in the schedule.

COVID-19 is a great example of why you need to understand critical path and adjusting it if needed. On larger projects, where you can have thousands of pieces of equipment coming in from all over the world, not knowing where your critical path is would be devastating to your project. 

Let’s use two examples:

Project A has a clear understanding of which tasks and major activities are on a critical path. When COVID hits, it’s very easy for the project manager to predict if an item will be delayed enough to become part of the critical path. Knowing the critical path allows the project manager to quickly pinpoint high risk areas, so even though thousands of pieces of equipment are delayed, she and her team only need to focus their efforts on 20 out of the thousand.  

The project manager on Project B doesn’t have a great schedule or a clear understanding of what’s on the critical path. This project also has thousands of pieces of equipment coming in from all over the world. However, when vendors start calling and telling the project manager they will be late because of COVID, he doesn’t know which call is most important. Now he’s scrambling to develop a schedule while getting new data points everyday on how much each vendor is delayed. While all this is going on, he fails to see that his critical path has now shifted onto a critical piece of equipment, and by the time he realizes it, it’s too late to regain the schedule. Now his project is delayed—the last thing any project manager wants. Time is money, remember? 

You always need float  

My first experience with project management was when I was just out of college.  A compressor had gone down and we were the only unit in the plant making a decent margin. Everyone wanted to understand how quickly we could get the unit back up and running. We had gone to a vendor to see when they would be able to make the repair. They told us they’d be able to do it in x amount of time. 

It was my job to write the email putting the plan together to fix the compressor. I wrote the email and had the x amount of time the contractor said, because I knew there was urgent need, and I thought that being honest was the best thing to do. 

I asked the inspector on the job to review the repair prior to submitting to management.  I’ll never forget the conversation I had with him. In his Louisiana slang, he said, “You got to have some lagniappe on that schedule!”  Lagniappe, I had just learned, is a Louisiana term meaning “just a little bit more,” and that’s exactly what this task needed. 

Float is just a little more time allotted than what you think the job will take you. 

What I didn’t understand back then was that when someone asks you when they expect something done, there is an implied probability in the question. 

When you give a deadline for a project, your customer has a certain expectation of the confidence level of hitting that schedule. It differs depending on the industry you are in, and what your project is. But in most cases, what they are really asking is: tell me when this will be done and I won’t be wrong if I tell others. Protect your schedule by always adding float to tasks. 

Your ability to influence schedule decreases over time

Projects have schedules for a couple of reasons, a major reason being that projects are investments. You spend time, money, and resources to develop a project. Without a schedule, you can’t accurately calculate the return on your investment because time is a key component. We also use schedules as a tool to help drive project completion. 

Once a schedule is developed, maintaining that schedule becomes a key objective to the project manager. Pushing out the end date of a schedule is a last resort, because there are contractual implications to delaying a project.  Additionally, most people are overly optimistic on their schedules and believe they can pull levers to “right the ship” and finish on time. 

A schedule is built with two key components: number of tasks and manpower required. 

Additionally, there are only two things that can help reduce schedule: reducing the amount of tasks required or increasing productivity, which almost always happens by adding manpower. 

The issue with waiting to find out your schedule is “off” is illustrated in the above graph. If I find out at the smiley face that my schedule is trending late, I have a much longer time period to work to correct the schedule. With that extra time, I could hire additional people, train new workers, and work just a little bit faster every week for the next 10 months to catch up.  

If I find out at the frown face, I’ve got very few levers I can pull to correct it because the project is almost completed and most critical activities have passed. It’s too big of a hole to dig out of. 

Knowing that you have a limited time to influence your schedule is critical to staying proactive. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “no news is good news.” However, if you find out your project is running late too late—you’re past the point of return. 

 Did you guess these three fundamental truths about scheduling? Is there one I missed? Tell me in the comments below or @theomarproject on Twitter.