| Time management is a critically important skill for any successful project manager. I have observed that Project Managers who succeed in meeting their project schedule have a good chance of staying within their project budget. The most common cause of blown project budgets is lack of schedule management. Fortunately there is a lot of software on the market today to help you manage your project schedule or timeline. Any project can be broken down into a number of tasks that have to be performed. To prepare the project schedule, the project manager has to figure out what the tasks are, how long they will take, what resources they require, and in what order they should be done. The difficulty in managing a project schedule is that there are seldom enough resources and enough time to complete the tasks sequentially. Therefore, tasks have to be overlapped so several happen at the same time. Project management software (see sidebar) greatly simplifies the task of creating and managing the project schedule by handling the iterations in the schedule logic for you. When all tasks have been listed, resourced, and sequenced, you will see that some tasks have a little flexibility in their required start and finish date. This is called float. Other tasks have no flexibility, zero float. A line through all the tasks with zero float is called the critical path. All tasks on this path, and there can be multiple, parallel paths, must be completed on time if the project is to be completed on time. The Project Manager's key time management task is to manage the critical path. |
Managing Time and Schedule
