Improvisational Scheduling
Scheduling isn’t a script where every task occurs on cue. It’s really more like battle planning — or stand-up comedy — where what matters is having a well thought-out plan that shows whether you’re going too fast or too slow, and how to react in order to survive.
“Nothing runs the way you schedule it. It never happens,” says Alice C. Barnes, a senior project manager with Keane, a Boston-based consulting firm. She says the real value of scheduling is to know where you stand once you’re knee-deep in a project. Barnes remembers working for AT&T when Lucent Technologies split off from it. The schedule for the final 24 hours leading up to the split “went around an entire conference room, from floor to ceiling,” she says. “It was the most detailed thing I’d ever seen,” involving hundreds of applications and systems (some from the 19th century), and tasks scheduled down to the minute for every member of the team.
Yet, despite the enormous preparation that went into the schedule, it wasn’t perfect. “Everything ran faster,” Barnes says. “You’d be running an hour ahead of schedule, but because you’d hit an external dependency, you wouldn’t start the next task. You’d just wait.”
In the final analysis, the company split wrapped up “perfectly on time.” And that’s the point, Barnes says. Sometimes you do nothing — or you finish faster — or you move tasks around. Schedules change. It’s OK. Her advice: “Concentrate your energy on the critical path. Keep it running equal to the estimate.” If a task isn’t on your critical path, “it doesn’t matter. Things that by definition can start late or take longer without affecting the end date of a project — they can float around.”
Scheduling Sources
Many remodelers keep their projects on track using a combination of paper-based systems along with a PDA hot-synched to their computer. If you require more than the basics, but less than a complicated scheduling software package, consider the following:
Milestones Simplicity lets you create basic presentation-ready project schedules. $55; available at www.kidasa.com.
SmartDraw 7 has 1,200+ templates for easy creation of flowcharts, calendars, Gantt charts, and more. $197; available at www.smartdraw.com.
ConceptDraw Project lets you plan and manage several projects at once. The full ConceptDraw Business Suite incorporates more graphics for illustrating concepts and schedules. $179 and $499 respectively; available at www.conceptdraw.com.
Microsoft Office Online has free downloads of scheduling templates that work with Excel, Project, and other Microsoft programs. Available at http://office.microsoft.com.