INTRODUCTION

The monthly view shows what jobs have to be done each week for the project manager's projects to stay on schedule. The weekly routine involves extracting from the monthly view a week's worth of work. This should be done at the end of a particular week or at the very beginning of the next week.

To build a weekly schedule, the project manager reads from the monthly view the contents of the coming week, and schedules this over the five (or six or seven, but ideally five) days of the week. Let's illustrate this by taking a week from the example shown in Figure 11.1.

Week of 1 “5 August

The project manager will spend about half the week involved in routine work, but there is one big job, the integration plan, that is going to require two days' solid work. If this is the case, then the project manager might set two specific days aside for this, e.g. Tuesday and Thursday. On these days he would be saying that no routine work will be done, and anyone requiring these things will have to wait. Thus his week would look like:

Monday	Routine stuff
Tuesday	Start integration plan
Wednesday	Routine stuff
Thursday	Finish integration plan
Friday	Routine stuff

Again, if changes occur in the course of the week, or new priorities arise, the project manager can reschedule across the week, and if necessary, into subsequent weeks, using the monthly view as an overall context within which to make decisions.