As a new project manager with a lot more information at your fingertips now, you may be wondering about handling the schedule of the project you are leading. This is a very important thing because depending on which method that you use to get the project done, it can be very different. Today we are going to talk about the differences between Agile schedule management and more predictive approaches schedule management. I am going to start off by giving you a generic run down of project schedule management.
It all starts like most other parts of projects with planning. This comes as no surprise because planning is a crucial part of just managing a project in general so why would you not also plan how you will go about managing the schedule. In this plan, you want to have a couple of different items to help you keep track of how you will manage the schedule.
Project schedule model: This contains estimated durations of the project mostly.
Level of accuracy and units of measure: This will be what tells you how accurate the schedule estimates should be and the unit of time you will use to measure the project.
Rules of performance measurement: This will be what tells the people working on the project how they are to determine the percentages of work done or progress made on a task.
Reporting formats: This details the frequency of performance reports and also how they are to be written.
Process descriptions: This helps define how the schedule management processes will be performed.
The next step in planning a project is to define activities that will lead to the deliverables that come out of the project. You may be thinking that you already defined activities enough, but it is always a good idea to go into more detail about the activities. This is because you want to have an estimate for how long they will take to complete and also the resources that will be required to complete it. While in this step, you might wanna make a couple of milestones for your project to make sure that you are keeping on pace. A milestone is an accumulation of activities that have been completed and does not have a timeline but is super important for the timeline.
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Another big part of managing the project schedule is whether or not there are certain tasks that have a dependency on another task to be completed before it can be started. This is vital to understand because not understanding this correctly can come back and bite you in the butt later on in the project when it might be a pain to get back on track and also it might mess with your plan in general.
Next will be determining the duration of activities. Now this might seem like I am just repeating myself from earlier, but do not be confused by the term duration. What I mean by that is the fact that the duration of an activity is different from the effort of an activity. The duration of an activity is more about the actual time line for how long the activity will be completed whereas the effort of an activity is more specifically about how much effort or hours goes into that certain task. The effort on an activity may be 20 hours but if you complete that activity in two weeks because of outside circumstances, then the duration of the activity is two weeks since it took that long overall.
Now that we have some generic information out of the way, we can start talking about the differences between the predictive approach and Agile approach. The predictive approach is all about exactly what the name implies, it is mainly about predicting how long things will take and making a plan based off of that. One of the main differences between the two approaches is that they use radically different methods to plan. One of the methods for the predictive approaches is the Critical Path Method. This is used to calculate the total duration of the project so that you can have a better understanding of how long it will take. The critical path of a project shows the series of tasks that will be completed that results in the shortest time that the project can be completed.
Making the critical path will require network diagrams which will be discussed in a different blog post but here is an example of one just so you can see it.
One of the pretty cool things about the critical path is that if you know it pretty well, you are able to make adjustments if needed. Say that a stakeholder would like the project to be done earlier than projected, if you know the critical path then you can make some key decisions that can shorten the length of the project. Some of these decisions may include allocating more resources to certain tasks because other tasks have a dependency on it for them to complete.
Now to move on to the Agile section of this blog. When it comes to Agile, there is a lot more involvement from product owners, stakeholders, etc. The environment that Agile provides for a team is very hospitable for feeling a collaborative effort from everyone. Since there are daily meetings, sprint retrospectives, and sprint planning meetings, there is a good sense of understanding in the whole team of what needs to be done during each sprint.
As you may be able to tell, in Agile there is no thing like the critical path method because that is a very fixed way of doing things and that is not what Agile is about at all. Agile is all about wanting to be able to adapt to circumstances and deciding what needs to be done before each sprint helps to accomplish that. Having a rigid set of steps to follow would kill the vibe of collaboration and project ownership that Agile developers may feel in an Agile environment.
This is why it is very important for you to figure out what method works best for your team and the project that you are working on. When it comes to project schedule management it is even more important because there are very big differences between the two approaches in the schedule management so make sure to make the right decision for your project. Good luck to you and your team!
Sources:
Schwalbe, Kathy. Information Technology Project Management. Available from: Yuzu, (9th Edition). Cengage Learning US, 2023.
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