How to create a project schedule? Learn with a practical example!

Maximize project clarity with a Project Charter

Ensure you clearly understand the project’s results and business outcomes. This clarity is best achieved by filling out a Project Charter, a document that serves as a compass, guiding the project’s direction and ensuring its successful delivery.

Many project teams start a project without developing a good Project Charter or even creating a good schedule—they start acting and implementing the project. This is a substantive mistake and the most common reason for potential project failure.

To build a good schedule, you need to know what you want to achieve. The Project Charter is the basic and one of the most critical project documents. At this stage, the concept is formed, defining the project’s business objectives, scope, milestones, critical deadlines, risks, and costs. While filling out the Project Charter, many questions and concerns arise, and their answers ensure that the project becomes increasingly crystallized.

At this stage, the various project stakeholders can also have their very important say – everyone agrees that the project should look exactly like this and not like that. Once we are sure that we have a well-developed Project Charter, it should be formally approved by the rules of a particular company. I think it is also worth adding that the Project Charter should be updated during its implementation to reflect the current shape of the project all the time. An example of a system Project Charter from the FlexiProject system is presented in the following illustration:

Identify the main products the project is expected to deliver

There is a method of creating a project plan called Product Based Planning. It involves defining the products/outputs the project will deliver and then constructing the phases, stages, tasks, and milestones to deliver those products. This is a very effective method, albeit in practice, quite often, the definition of the products and the structure of the tasks leading to their realization are done in parallel. This iterative approach works very well in practice. So, after completing the Project Charter, we create a list of products that the project is supposed to deliver and concisely describe them so that no ambiguity remains. The following illustration shows the list of deliverables created in FlexiProject:

In the illustration above, you can see that each product has an associated task in the project schedule, ensuring that this product will be created and placed in a specific place. Of course, this linkage to the scheduled tasks will only be made once we start building the project task structure, described in the next section. This approach ensures that no products will be “orphaned,” as can be seen with the penultimate two products in the list, which are not linked to any scheduled task – in which case a red light should immediately go on in the project manager’s head that the project schedule is not complete.

The following illustration, on the other hand, shows how, in practice, in the FlexiProject project management system, you can link a product to a specific task. On the product card, we have a “schedule” field that, when clicked, shows us the schedule structure—we select a particular task, click OK, and I have a product associated with the schedule.

Another illustration below shows how, on the schedule structure itself, you can see which tasks have specifically assigned project deliverables – then the “package/box” symbol appears in the line of that task.  This approach comforts the project manager that he has not forgotten anything.

Identify project phases, stages, and milestones

After identifying the project deliverables—which, as we said earlier, quite often happens in parallel in practice—we identify the main phases of the project. This is important to imagine what big “building blocks” our project will consist of. For example, in the case of New Product Development projects, the first phase might be “Concept Development,” and the second phase might be “Business Case Preparation,” etc.

After defining the project phases, we can divide each phase into stages and add milestones. The latter is worth placing after the completion of each phase so that it is summarized formally, and we can thus move on to the next phase. Such a focus on the overall-level structure of the project at the beginning makes quite a lot of sense in practice.

Identify the tasks in the project

Once the overall-level schedule structure has been developed, we identify specific project tasks, as shown in the following illustration.

Build logical links/dependencies between different tasks

By establishing links or logical dependencies between tasks in your project, you can effectively schedule the project, maintain order, and ensure logical progression. This approach also benefits those responsible for tasks that rely on others, as they will be notified when the preceding task is complete, and they can begin their work. Furthermore, any delays in the prior task will be readily apparent on the Gantt chart, providing clear visibility:

Assign responsibility for the implementation of individual tasks and their completion dates

After building the whole structure of the schedule and describing the products and logical dependencies between the tasks, we can determine the responsibility and dates for implementing individual tasks, their labor intensity, and duration. At this point, it will be beneficial to build relationships between tasks—if there are any, the system will keep an eye on the dates of dependent tasks so they do not overlap.

Complete the schedule with additional fields that will help you manage it better in the future

This is a handy functionality offered by the FlexiProject system because it allows great flexibility in planning and detailing the schedule. Namely, the FlexiProject project management system will enable you to create columns on the schedule with any name you want.

Suppose a project manager wants to prioritize individual tasks, i.e., show which tasks have priority and which are essential and routine. Then, he builds an additional “Priority” column and defines the possible fields for selection. In addition, if the project manager wants to see project streams equivalent to organizational cells in the company, he builds a column “department” of the company and uses it on the schedule. If this is done, it is straightforward to filter the schedule and see which tasks are assigned to the sales department, which to the production department, and what priorities they have.

In addition, the FlexiProject system allows you to display a Gantt chart colored, for example, by priority or department in the company. This approach is practical insofar as many people are visual learners and, seeing, for example, a task in orange, they immediately know that it is the highest priority task – the following illustration shows a colored Gantt chart by priority:

Approve the schedule plan to monitor deviations at the implementation stage

The schedule constructed in this way can be saved as a so-called baseline, or the project’s base plan, to which we will later refer during implementation and analyze deviations. On the Gantt chart, as in the illustration below, the baseline plan will be shown with a thin black line next to each task and the current progress of the project with a thicker blue bar:

While working on the schedule, write down the risks that come to your mind and the potential costs

While building the schedule, potential project risks often come to mind, which are worth noting immediately so that they don’t “get away from us.” The FlexiProject system allows us to record project risks from the project task level, which is very convenient in such a case. If we identify a specific risk and assign it to a particular task, then in the line of that task, we will see a triangle with an exclamation mark, as in the following illustration:

From concept to completion: building effective schedule