Chapter 15. Develop Schedule

"If you build it, he will come."

” The Voice ^[1]

^[1] Field of Dreams , Phil Alden Robinson, Director; W.P. Kinsella (book), Phil Alden Robinson, Writer, 1989.

The next step in developing your business case is to develop a project schedule using Microsoft Project or similar project scheduling tools (see Figure 15.1). In this chapter we also look at another step in developing the business case, which involves allocating the actual team members and clearly documenting your assumptions regarding team members and skills.

Figure 15.1. Developing a project execution plan and project staffing

Most project management texts spend a considerable amount of time on the issue of project schedules, so we cover only the key concepts.

To be honest, the concept of task scheduling is so easy that, for example, if five-year-old children hadn't grasped the concepts of tasks and dependencies they would be having a shower with their clothes on and going to bed before they got up (with apologies to Monty Python).

For novice readers, software packages such as Microsoft Project (which is an industry standard) have very easy tutorials that we strongly recommend as a guide. ^[2] In many extreme projects, the rate of change is so high that using lower tech tools such as Post-it notes as tasks placed on a board is perfect.

^[2] It is amazing to us how many "project management" books are really Microsoft tutorials in disguise.

The second process we cover in this chapter is more complex. It involves the allocation of actual people to the tasks or, even more interestingly, the abstract allocation of "resources" unknown to the project manager at the time of planning. It is in this process that many eXtreme project managers are confronted with the nature of eXtreme projects. In our client base, it is more common that the people undertaking the initial project planning are not the actual team that will be undertaking the project.