Chapter 10 - A Method for Evaluating and Adjusting Your Schedule Introduction Make Your Plan Accurate and Complete Review Project Goals, Scope, and Assumptions Add or Delete Tasks Refine Task-Duration Estimates Check the Project Finish Date Determine If Fixed-Date Constraints Are Necessary Check Costs vs Budget Identify and Correct Obvious Errors Streamline Your Plan Shorten the Schedule Use Resources as Efficiently as Possible Reduce Project Costs Microsoft Project 98 – Chapter 10 Page of Introduction After you’ve put together your project plan, and whenever a change in scope, resources, or time can affect the project completion date, you should evaluate and then adjust your schedule Evaluating your schedule will give you an accurate picture of what you may need to adjust Make sure that your schedule contains complete and accurate information, models your project realistically, and meets your project goals as efficiently as possible Then, adjust your schedule as necessary You should follow two major steps to evaluate and adjust your schedule First, make sure your plan is accurate and complete Take a high-level look at your project plan Does it meet project goals? Does it include all necessary tasks? Are your cost, duration, and work estimates accurate? Did you enter any erroneous information, such as assigning the wrong resource to a task? Second, streamline your plan if possible Take a close look at your project plan Is your plan as lean as you can make it? A lean plan includes only the tasks necessary to accomplish your goals It uses resources efficiently, ends on the earliest possible date, and costs as little as possible This chapter spells out a number of key ways to make your plan accurate and complete It also summarizes the actions you can take to streamline your plan, such as shortening your schedule and reducing project costs For more detailed information about how to streamline your plan, see chapters 11 to 13 If you regularly save each version of your project under a new name, you can easily revert to the previous version For example, you can include the current date in the name of each version of the project file: Plan7-9, Plan8-9, and so on Make Your Plan Accurate and Complete You can save time fine-tuning project details by taking a fresh look at the main components in your plan, such as tasks and resources You should reevaluate the assumptions and goals that led you to include them For instance, before you change the number of resources assigned to a task, you may find that your plan doesn’t require that task at all Microsoft Project 98 – Chapter 10 Page of This would also be a good time to look for any obvious errors that may have inadvertently slipped into your plan, such as an incorrect hourly rate for a resource Review Project Goals, Scope, and Assumptions Because the project goals you set help determine the steps required in your project plan, and thus the scope, you can start your evaluation by finding out whether the goals have changed since you started building your plan Or, you might refine your original goals by making them as specific and measurable as possible For example, a lofty goal such as "Produce the best product in its category" may sound good, but it’s so general that identifying all the steps required to achieve it may prove impossible A specific goal, such as "Make this product 10 percent smaller than its predecessor," is measurable, achievable, and readily broken down into concrete steps As you review your goals and scope, you can examine your assumptions If you haven’t already documented your most important assumptions, now may be a good time to so For instance, ask yourself the following questions: • How might relationships with vendors and clients affect the project? • What are the skill levels of team members, and how will those skill levels affect task speed and quality? • Will the cost of materials increase, decrease, or remain the same over the course of the project? • How might any other external factors affect the project? Consider the impact that inclement weather or high unemployment might have on your project During the course of the project, you should reevaluate your assumptions and change your project plan to take new circumstances into account For instance, if a less-skilled painter replaces a more-skilled one, you might need to add time to your estimate for how long it will take to paint a room Add or Delete Tasks After you reevaluate your goals and assumptions, you may find that the project scope has changed For example, if you’ve cut or refined a goal, some or all of the tasks required to achieve it may no longer be necessary On the other hand, if you’ve added a goal, you may need to add tasks But your goals don’t have to change in order for you to add or remove tasks from your project plan A scan of your task list may reveal tasks that are redundant, trivial, or so large that they should be broken down into smaller tasks Microsoft Project 98 – Chapter 10 Page of Refine Task-Duration Estimates The more accurate the information in your project plan, the more accurately Microsoft Project can schedule tasks That’s why it’s so important to take one more look at your task-duration estimates Can some tasks be accomplished in less time? Realistically, does your experience and intuition tell you that some tasks will take longer than you’ve estimated? Using the best information available, put any new or improved task-duration estimates into your project plan Check the Project Finish Date The project finish date calculated by Microsoft Project will give you a good sense of whether you can achieve your project goals on time If you create a schedule that ends on or before the required finish date, you’re likely to achieve your goals on time But if your schedule ends after the required finish date, you may need to shorten or remove some tasks or pare down your goals Of course, the project finish date in your schedule, like a person’s body temperature, is only one indicator of your schedule’s overall "health." While it can alert you to problems, it can’t identify specific causes You’ll have to determine the reasons yourself Look for too many tasks, inappropriate links between tasks, too few or too many resources assigned to a task, or unnecessary constraints But just as a normal body temperature can sometimes mask underlying problems, an on-time project finish date might hide problems as well Checking your project finish date should be but one action in your strategy to evaluate and streamline your project plan Determine If Fixed-Date Constraints Are Necessary When a task really must start or finish on or near a specific date, you can apply the appropriate fixed-date constraint for that task, such as the Must Start On constraint or the Must Finish On constraint But applying unnecessary fixed-date constraints can prevent Microsoft Project from calculating a schedule properly For instance, if you specify that a task must start on a certain date when it doesn’t have to, you might prevent Microsoft Project from scheduling that task to start at the earliest possible date In general, the earlier your tasks start (and finish), the earlier your project finishes Sometimes, project managers apply a fixed-date constraint when they don’t intend to (for instance, if they enter a specific start date and finish date for a task after they enter the task) If you link tasks, you don’t have to enter dates in the Start and Finish fields because Microsoft Project will it for you You can also inadvertently apply fixed-date constraints by dragging the pointer on the Gantt Chart to create a task bar (and thus a task) If you create a task this way, by default Microsoft Project constrains the task depending on which way you drag the pointer If you drag the pointer from left to right, Microsoft Project will constrain the task to start no earlier than a date If you drag the pointer from right to left, the task will be constrained to finish no earlier than a date You should check all tasks with fixed-date constraints to make sure each constraint is necessary and hasn’t been applied by mistake Check Costs vs Budget If you’ve entered task and resource costs in your project plan, you can check your total project cost If it’s over budget or unacceptably high, you’ll need to look at individual task and resource costs to see if you can reduce them For example, you might be able to cut the scope of a task or replace an expensive resource with a less costly one Identify and Correct Obvious Errors Everybody makes mistakes, so it’s no disgrace to find that you’ve made some when adding information to your project plan But leaving them in will make your plan a less accurate and reliable tool for predicting and controlling the course of your project It’s better to look for and correct those mistakes before your project is well under way The following are some of the most common errors: • You’ve added incorrect information about tasks and resources For example, is a fixed cost, such as the cost of materials associated with a task, accurate? Did you inadvertently enter a 12-day duration for a task that takes only days to complete? Microsoft Project 98 – Chapter 10 Page of • • • • A resource is assigned to the wrong task Perhaps you’ve assigned a plumber to a roofing task Some information is inconsistent with other information Did you intend to pay one of your 10 painters $20.00 per hour while paying the others $15.00 per hour? Tasks are out of order For example, the wall can’t be painted before it’s built Tasks or resources are missing Between "Raising the frame" and "Building the walls" you might need to insert "Adding the insulation." Streamline Your Plan After you review your project plan for overall accuracy and completeness, you fine-tune your schedule even more by making trade-offs among scope, resources, and time — the three main factors that shape a project In most projects, some of these factors are constrained and some are flexible For example, if you have a deadline that can’t be missed and you can’t remove tasks to reduce the scope, perhaps you can hire more resources Or, if you have a limited number of resources, you might be able to reduce the scope When you refine your project plan, you focus on shortening the schedule, using resources as efficiently as possible, and reducing project costs The following sections summarize these objectives, which are covered in more detail in chapters 11 to 13 Shorten the Schedule To shrink your project schedule, look at critical tasks first If you want, you can display critical tasks in order of longest to shortest duration; you can then see which critical tasks have the biggest effect on the project end date If you can shorten the duration of the longest tasks, you might be able to shorten the overall length of your project You can shorten task durations by assigning more resources, reducing task scope, or breaking large tasks into smaller tasks and starting some sooner You can also make tasks end sooner by changing their links Use Resources as Efficiently as Possible Make sure each resource is working productively during each working hour Resources should be neither underworked nor overworked If a resource is scheduled to work more than full-time on one or more days, you might want to assign a less-occupied resource to take over part of the work If an overworked resource is working on two tasks simultaneously, you might delay the start of one task so the resource can work on them sequentially Reduce Project Costs Usually, a big part of overall project cost is the cost of resources So reducing costs often means reducing resource costs You can this in a number of ways For example, you can replace expensive resources with less Microsoft Project 98 – Chapter 10 Page of expensive ones Or, you can use as few resources as possible Another way to reduce project costs is to look for tasks that are over budget Try to reduce their resource and materials costs or even eliminate them if they’re not necessary Finally, feel free to experiment Make whatever changes you need to hone your schedule With Microsoft Project, you can see the effect of each change instantly, decide whether it’s beneficial, and then make any other changes you think necessary to produce an effective project schedule Microsoft Project 98 – Chapter 10 Page of