It is easy to implement scheduling processes without making them really useful and effective for the Project Manager. We have distilled a number of key principles for Project Scheduling in 20 principles – Golden Rules in our new White Paper 2015-13. They can easily be used as a reference to check if your scheduling process indeed responds to these basic requirements that will ensure that the Project will remain under control schedule-wise.

1. Accountability
2. Project Scope, Cost & Schedule consistency:
3. Align with the Project strategy
4. Develop schedules from the top down
5. Reflect reality candidly
6. Keep true to the Immediacy principle
7. Implement a Proper Schedule hierarchy and formats
8. Limit detail and complication of the Integrated Project Schedule
9. Increase the schedule robustness and resilience instead of minimizing the Critical Path
10. Float and Buffers are to be owned by the Project Manager
11. Fight the ‘virtual’ float creation
12. Be disciplined in updating the Convergence Plan
13. Update the schedule bottom-up
14. Check regularly the quality of the schedule update
15. Base the schedule re-forecast on a root cause analysis
16. Reforecast future activities based on the knowledge acquired from ongoing and past activities
17. Accuracy over precision
18. Ensure full traceability of all schedule logic changes
19. Raise Extension of Time requests as soon as they are known
20. Understand and compensate for the known psychological biases

These rules will be further explained and expanded in the next White Papers and they also form the basis of our new Advanced Scheduling Handbook. Read our new White Paper 2015-13 ‘Project Value Delivery’s 20 Golden Rules for Project Scheduling‘ for more details on these 20 Golden Rules!