Is this a familiar sounding scenario?  You rush through the planning phase trying to get to the answer of “when will the work be finished?”.  You throw a schedule together with meticulous detail to determine that all important date, then promptly never look at it again.  Or, you lay out the schedule according to the different teams that will be working on the project, or according to the different work life cycles, or some other scheme you think easy to update.  Then when you take your project schedule into a meeting with executive stakeholders to report on status, one of them asks about the overall status of the XYZ component.  Suddenly you find yourself scrambling to piece it together verbally on the fly from multiple sections of your schedule.

The project schedule is a key artifact of any project.  It’s first function during planning is to determine the baseline milestone dates for the project, but it should be an active document that lives on throughout the project.  It should always reflect the latest target milestone dates as well as updated progress towards those milestones.  As such it serves as one of the primary communication tools on the project.  Therefore it should be structured in such a way that it is convenient for update by those that must maintain it, and at the same time should communicate information in a form that is relevant to the stakeholders that consume it.  The amount of detail revealed should vary by audience.

This starts with giving thought to the layout of tasks on the schedule.  I advise structuring multiple levels of organization. 

  1. Make the first or outer level of organization align to whatever is important to the business sponsors you will be answering to.  This will obviously vary from project to project and assume you have done a good job determining this in scope definition.  This might be something such as implementation of a new CRM application, or construction of a new facility.  That way you can always collapse the sub-levels of detail below that and get an overall status that is of interest to the business. 
  2. The second inner level of organization can be by team (such as software development, or desktop support,  or electricians, or landscaping). 
  3. The third level of organization can be by phase or life cycle or activity within the team (such as software requirements, testing, desktop computer upgrades, foundation, framing, etc.). 

Where possible, use summary or rollup tasks so that underlying detail can be hidden when appropriate.  Sometimes an entire section of work activity is led by a sub-team leader and a separate project schedule is maintained by that person.  When this is the case, I recommend reaching agreement ahead of time on summary tasks in the master schedule as alignment points with the “sub-schedule”.  Then the sub-team leader can maintain the detail in his/her schedule and simply report on the status against the summary task.

Finally, the project schedule is a wonderful tool for communicating if used properly in meetings, but as mentioned in a previous article, it’s never a good idea to display it in order to gather status and do updating in the meeting.  That’s the project manager’s job to be done before the team meeting in individual one on one settings with team members.  Once updated to reflect the latest status toward milestones, the project schedule should then be viewed (with appropriate detail shown according to the audience) to communicate current progress.  One of my favorite tools I add is a stoplight field which is automatically updated each time the schedule is opened, that sets itself to red, yellow or green (or blank) indicating whether the task is not due to start yet, on target, at risk, or overdue.  This helps immediately draw the eye to those tasks that need discussion and prevents wasting time on tasks that either haven’t started yet or don’t require intervention.

Remember, project management is more than anything else about communication, and the project schedule should be one of the key tools to aid in that communication throughout the project, so keep it current and keep it relevant to each audience where it will be viewed.