Project Schedule management is a huge step in making sure your project is successful and delivers on time. Project schedule management involves brainstorming activities to list, determining when deliverables should be produced, start and end dates for a project, and how resources will be distributed for each work activity.
The first step is planning a schedule and to plan a schedule one should have a solid work breakdown structure or WBS. The WBS is what will kickstart your schedule and allow you to have a sort of guideline as to when deliverables should be produced and how the project will progress. Planning upfront will save from massive headaches and work stoppages down the road. Another step in planning is defining and arranging activities. These activities should be actual work that will be put into the project, and your job is to define them in small increments and arrange them in a way that allows the project to continue a gradual walk to completion.
The second step is estimating work. When your project schedule in just about done being planned you should be able to see the steps needed in each time frame to deliver on time and have a nice clean project. In this phase, you will then estimate the amount of work needed for each activity you have defined. Estimating work for activities should be done carefully to make sure they can actually be completed in the assigned work time and still give enough time for holdups and stoppages. Once work is estimated for each project you should be able to then start assigning resources for each activity.
The last step is to make sure that you monitor your schedule and help it evolve with the project. No plan is perfect which means that your schedule will also surely not be perfect as well. As time goes on projects tend to gain some weight and new issues arise at different points, this means that as a schedule manager you will have to start from one issue and reevaluated the remaining work, whether work needs to be added or subtracted; one should strive to still plan to hit key deliverable dates. Making fine-tunes to the schedule as time progresses will help exponentially instead of waiting until one large work stoppage to go ahead and readdress the remaining work.
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