Enjoy this video of my free online PMP Exam Preparation Training course and prepare to sit and pass the PMP certification exam from PMI. This PMP training video covers the Project Schedule Management Knowledge Area in PMBOK6 and starts with the Plan Schedule Management process.
So let’s move with schedule management this one although it is technical it is actually easy and the reason I think it’s easy it’s because it’s sequential the processes follow each other you go from let’s see you go from forget the planned schedule management this is similar to when we were doing planned scope management this is not a sequential process this is your approach that you wanna use with scheduling remember yesterday I showed you a WBS that I created in software called open proj but I also showed you another one in Microsoft Word so the exciting that I want to use this or that that’s your approach that was for plans called management to decide if I should use a tool or not and if you use Excel for requirements documentation or not so the decisions you make about the approach and the you know that the crown rules that you want to use or what if we have to make a change but will baseline you know all the terms and conditions or ground rules that you want to apply for your approach those are the ones that you see in the beginning it says plan scope management and here I’ll show you why we have planned schedule management but beyond this this is where we will identify the activities we will and when you identify them you use decomposition from the WBS you just break down the WBS into its activities and don’t be worried you don’t have to be technical because you’re not one of us to do it you ask the team lead who you’ve assigned that WBS task to go and figure out the activities with their own teams they they know what they’re doing it’s their specialty it’s not yours you your specialty has to be a project management and then once you identify the activities you can connect them in the right order which one has to happen first which one is next and even when you have activities coming hey my hands are like WBS packages right and the fingers are the activities sometimes you’ll find that this one finger here is going to connect or maybe needs to finish before another activity here on a different WBS needs to happen so I will take information from the team lead here and then the team lead here and then I will connect the activities in the proper order so then I can stay on top of it right so we will define the activities we will sequence them we will estimate how long they will take we will finalize our schedule and then we just need to keep an eye on the schedule so it is just back-to-back sequential technical it is related to creating schedules however there will be lots of new words to add so if words worry you then put on your helmet or something because there’s going to be additional terminology that we throw in lots of new terminology things that you will notice things you need to know about different ways that we do scheduling here on this screen it shows you that a the top bullet that you see there this is referring to a giant and you see it says this is a form of rolling wave planning based on adaptive night cycles and if you recall adaptive is what we is another word for agile iterative scheduling with a backlog agile always works with a backlog of features or requirements that they want to complete and the goal is that they will you know package them into sprints do them and then reprioritize the remaining backlog pick whatever they can do in two weeks put them in another sprint complete it with frequent reviews like that so it’s like rolling wave because at the end of every sprint they have better clarity and now that gives them a you know more insight to be able to assess going forward so that’s called iterative scheduling using a backlog and that’s what agile is there’s also on-demand scheduling and in on-demand scheduling they have a you know a pile of work a stack of work and hmm whoever is free will work on the next one okay this is not necessarily what we do in project management although it can be used in some places in your project where you have something repetitive and you see here the concept is that the team pulls work from a backlog as resources become available right and then the third item their adaptive approaches that’s almost the same as what we were mentioning at the top iterative scheduling with the backlog you’re using short cycles on the take work review the results and adapt that’s necessary that’s the definition of adaptive best definition of agile it goes the same with the item that you see on the top there so PMI in PMBOK 6re focused heavily on the concept of agile and you’re going to find that in 2020 21 that agile is going to be a lot more important so if you’re not too much into agile then get your certification now this year if you wait till next year you will need to know quite a bit about agile agile is going to be a lot more prominent next year so get your certification this year try as hard as you can to get it this year the agile flavor is minimal on the exam next year it’s going to be prominent and the structure is going to be different moving forward let’s get started with the schedule management part plans schedule management here is just for the approach so I like to read it backwards and I would say or maybe add a word I wish they would add a word plan schedule management add a word here that says approach plan schedule management approach that would have been a much better way to describe this because a lot of people read and schedule management and they think in its the schedule plan and they get it all confused so this is your schedule management approach and here you coming up with the policies become enough for the procedures documentation for how you want to plan how you want to develop manage and execute and control the whole project schedule so how will you be managing the project schedule I can assure you we don’t manage the schedule in the same way all right some are using Excel some don’t use any schedules some use this software here that’s not me I like to use software I’m not a software geek and that’s probably my weakest area is software but MS Project and or the one that I showed you yesterday open proj they’re very easy to use if you just get your hand on it and you’ll see that you can pick it up it’s not and then there’s a lot of online videos on YouTube that you can you know watch for a few minutes and it shows you what what you need to do so I’m a big fan of using tools if they’re available but you know learning complicated one sometimes it’s not it’s not my thing all right but excellent unless you’re doing a very very small project it’s a bit tough to actually manage with Excel because Excel yes it can give you a list you can put durations but it’s really hard to build in the dynamic changes so I cannot if one gets extended one activity I cannot see the impact on the rest unless I manually go change them or unless I want to build in macros or something there are creative people can do it and I can assure you Excel isn’t huge software because once I ordered the book I don’t have it here but it’s you know this is my head right the book is this thick if you can see it’s this thick it’s half the size of my head a 1/3 I guess my head is bigger but one-third it has a lot of information I read the first chapter and I learned a lot I gave up after I was like I don’t need to know that much about Excel but you could do a lot excel if you want to do programming in it and if you want to use macros you can but how many people really do that so if you’re going to be doing scheduling for a project or going to be reviewing schedules for project I think it’s best to have some sort software intended for scheduling and there’s also web-based solutions out there it doesn’t have to be Primavera MS Project for any of these there are some web tools that are really colorful so your organization should get into that so let’s take a look at what is in planning your schedule management again this is planning your schedule management approach and you see here that you come up with you’re in your schedule management plan as an output and there are many things that you consider see the tools and techniques if I now show you I don’t know if I have them on the screen because it looks like I’ve already put some information here these are similar to plan scope management it’s if I go back to plan scope management it is the same exact tools and techniques because what you’re doing is you are assessing your environment and the tools available to you and you’re looking at what are the options and determining okay what should I use or HR use excel should I use MS Project what do I want to go with ask my schedule tool but the schedule tool is just one thing let’s take a look at what else goes into a schedule management and things such as what the first one is the tool ok the schedule model development is the tool and not just that the iteration so the model may also include whether you want to use agile more agile or Sprint’s and so on that could be part of it and but it’s also mentioned here release and iteration length if you’re doing predictive or waterfall you’re planning the whole thing and if you decide to use MS Project then you could say that that’s how you’re going to develop the schedule so the first bullet may be talking about the tool the schedule model development and then or maybe even what you will now learn which is critical path finish to start and start to start things like that how we create the actual schedule that’s what they’re referring to in the beginning there and then the release and iteration length is whether you want to go with Sprint’s the level of accuracy is how obviously it’s clear but some create draft schedules and eventually enhance them the unit of measure you want to know if your schedules are read in days months you know weeks very very lengthy projects could actually be scheduled in weeks or months if you want but most of the time we’re using dates in IT sometimes they try to use hours but I think only in Excel they will not they typically would not use software for that organizational procedures links some had erps in the organization and have some other software tools organizational system databases and sometimes your software that you’re using for scheduling is linked to another database inside the organization and when you apply a reso it will mark them as already allocated now on this one project so there’s a linkage between the system that are used for scheduling and the other system inside the organization from HR me so if there are procedure links there for other process related things that we need to consider then that’s something you need to consider when you’re planning for scheduling and then the project schedule model maintenance talks about how often I’m going to be updating this I’d like to update whenever something significant happens on a year-and-a-half project I think if I update every week every two weeks it’s fine I I like every week I’m a very restless person so I always recommend to people to not go too long without updating because you don’t want to be questioned as the p.m. as to what happened at the site or with the software or with the tasks or with the process depends what your project is I don’t want to be in a position where I look weak you know so anything that I’m capable of doing I try to do and maintenance which means updating not construction it’s updating your schedule to make sure you have correct hours or correct doesn’t even have to be correct hours did certain things get completed as planned you know don’t let it wait you know it mushrooms into a bigger problem and speaking of problems to control thresholds is how big of a problem do you need to foresee or forecast before you escalate the problem to your management not escalate before you let them know you know a lot of times we’re waiting we don’t really given up we don’t say things that bad until they’ve really blown up in our face and so we you may want to set a threshold which you’ve seen with your team or with your management that says if we think we’re going to be one month or more behind we need to let management know before it actually happens this is if we think not when we are already late and for me if you think your work is going to be significantly impacted let’s say I only gave you a five day task right I may want to set rules that if you ever think that your work is going to be delayed by I think what everybody is different right if you have a five day task if you think you’re going to be delayed by a day even a day I want to know the reason is I may have a depending activity that a contractor is doing that’s waiting for you to finish so if you’re late the contract is gonna show up as planned if we already agreed with them and you haven’t finished so I really want to know but this usually happens on a smaller project when I’m talking about days on a larger project that’s the oil and gas you know installation that you know maybe you can talk about a month if you think you’re going to be one month late then let let us know because you know we may have to arrange for other things so these are the control treasures the notification point rule of rules of performance management performance measurement you could just go by variance from the original schedule but we also will learn later on about earned value and I’ll show you how to use CPI and SPI you know the magic words that make it sound like a real professional I’ll show you those you also need to discuss how we will be reporting on the schedule notice that in all of what we discussed so far we actually did discuss anything we did not create the schedule and the schedule management plan was simply just the approach that we want to use in working with our schedule you should do that with the team with the management just just to make sure that you are on the same ground same page before you move you know before you move forward with actual scheduling
