The integrated project schedule is an essential tool for piloting the project, and it also needs to be used to coordinate contributions. In our project reviews we observe that project schedules are too often not communicated systematically to project team members, which misses the point. In our new White Paper 2022-03 ‘How To Better Use the Project Schedule as a Communication Tool’, we explore why schedules are not actively communicated and what solutions can be put in place to achieve this objective.

Projects invest a lot of resources and effort in schedule management. Proper maintenance and forecasting using the integrated project schedule and more detailed schedules is essential for proper project piloting and taking decisions. (refer to White Paper 2015-14 ‘How to Build a Proper Project Schedule Hierarchy’ and White Paper 2015-18 ‘How to Produce an Adequate Integrated Project Schedule’).

One of the objectives of schedule management is also to ensure schedule data is communicated to all contributors. This is an essential action for actual synchronisation of all contributions and will also provide feedback that is useful for maintaining a realistic schedule. However, irrespective of possible weaknesses in the field of updating and reforecasting the integrated project schedule, we too often observe that the schedule is not systematically communicated to project team members. How can they then know what is expected from them and when?

In addition to those relatively conventional schedule sharing approaches, some advanced techniques can also be used based on the observation of the slippages between the few last schedule updates.

It is quite amazing that although projects expend significant effort and resources on schedule management, they tend to use only a limited value from the full dataset thus created. By exploiting historical variations between each schedule update and observing how key dates and floats evolve with respect to key project convergence points, a lot of insight can be gained on the actual trends of project execution (refer to White Paper 2016-06 “How to Use Float Monitoring Techniques”).

Too many projects expend significant effort on scheduling while exploiting little of its potential benefits. It is essential to ensure that integrated project schedule updates are widely communicated to make sure all contributors know what is expected and thus can coordinate their actions. Various approaches can easily be deployed to achieve a much-improved communication. In addition, advanced visualisations like float and key milestones monitoring over several successive schedule updates can also provide deep insights into project trends

If you can’t access the link to the white paper, copy and paste the following link in your browser: https://www.projectvaluedelivery.com/_library/2022-03_need_extend_schedule_comm_v1.pdf