IT Project Schedule

Creating a project schedule involves calculating the work being performed and the different phases of the project. To understand how many working days are available, the project manager should start by eliminating company holidays, stakeholder vacations, time-off, and days designated for special business functions. 

Then the project manager needs to break down the project into 1) phases; 2) activities; and 3) tasks. A phase is a group of activities that are required to complete a significant part of the project. Often phases will produce “interim deliverables,” which may consist of significant parts of the final product. Each activity in a phase will work toward creating that deliverable or interim deliverable. And each activity is broken down into tasks, which are individual work items that are necessary to complete the activity. 

To estimate the time required to complete each phase, activity, and task, the project manager will need to work with subject matter experts to understand what is required for each phase and how long each task in the phase will take. The time required to complete those tasks may partly depend on the expert’s skill level and whether that person has completed similar tasks in previous projects.

After these phases, activities, and tasks are determined, they need to be sequenced to determine the critical path, which consists of the shortest amount of time necessary to complete the project. To do that, each phase, activity, and task is sequenced into predecessors and successors. Some of these phases will overlap since some team members will be working on different phases. For example, if a project involves building software, the infrastructure team may build out the infrastructure that will host the software, while the developers are starting to build the software. This helps to shorten the critical path and reduce the time and budget required to complete the project. It may also help the project manager to determine when specific types of resources need to be available to complete the project. 

Project managers may use a number of tools for determining this schedule. Some of these include, but are not limited to:

The work breakdown structure (WBS) is a tool for dividing the project into a number of segments, i.e., tasks or steps, necessary to complete the project. The first step in creating a work breakdown structure is to meet with the subject matter experts (SMEs) to determine what tasks need to be completed and the amount of time each task will take. The project manager, then, sequences these tasks in the WBS from the start to finish. And many of these steps will overlap. The WBS could be created using a spreadsheet or software, such as Microsoft Project.

Some of the information necessary to plan each segment include what team members will be assigned to each segment and the amount of time necessary to complete each segment. From this, the project manager could estimate the costs of performing each segment, in terms of money, human resources, material investments, licenses, subscriptions, overhead, vendors, and so on. This WBS will also be used to plan the project milestones, including the completion of different phases, the entry and exit criteria of each phase, and the critical path. 

Once the work breakdown structure is complete, the project manager will want to show it to the project sponsor and obtain approval and sign off. 

Managing quality is necessary for delivering a satisfactory product. And project managers should have a number of quality checkpoints in place to ensure quality deliverables before they go into production. Some of these depend on architectural control responsibilities, or those who oversee building the deliverables. Some of these tests include:

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