Importance of Project Scheduling

Importance of Project Scheduling

Introduction

This brief essay on importance of project scheduling in the success of projects is an attempt to highlight the aspects of scheduling activity that endow it the value. Projects are allotted resources via budget, which is itself limited to a time frame. In the modern times, time is money and any delay is a direct loss to recipient organization. Apart from loss of time, there is also cost increase, since the timely occurrence actions is coherent with the efficient scheduling of resources in cost effective manner. This essay will present the further discussion on the importance of project scheduling with examples.

Discussion

Project schedule is simply a list of activities which are scheduled on specific times in a logical order, as to create complimentary progress possible, making the prerequisites completed before the later activities. This project scheduling requires resources, budget, and tasks to set the time of logically organized activities. It is the job of project manager to strategically define the activities to ensure that project is completed on time with minimum commitment of resources.

Project scheduling is not an exact process. It is described as part prediction, part estimation and part educated guess. Merely having a project schedule does not guarantee the completion of project on time. However, not having a project schedule almost does guarantee its failure. Since it will not be in a coordinated manner, lots of resources will be wasted and time of completion will be hardly met.

There are ways of handling the uncertainty involved with project management. The schedules are reviewed periodically and fine tuning in the schedules is made while the project is in progress. It is said that, nothing in this world is constant except, change. So in order to accommodate those changes, these revisions on timely basis in the schedules keep the project scheduling alive and effective. New risks arise in the face of uncertainty, these risks need to be calculated and provisions are made where possible. The final outcome of this initial scheduling and later revisions is that, a vision is transformed into a time based action plan (Brown and Hyer 2010).

Perhaps the most significant development in businesses of this era is the accountability. Anyone doubting this statement should study the broad forces designing the shape of businesses. Whether it is Marketing, finance, Human Resource, or product development, all are bounded by the control measures. This measurement of their effectiveness is done in order to find their true worth to organization. However, this measurement activity is useless without the role of controlling measures. Controlling measures in turn are depended on the schedules (Kerzner, 2003). These schedules provide a standard to match the actual performance, and thus the importance of scheduling is unprecedented.

The project schedules play their role in allocation of resources to relevant authorities and timing of these allocations. The project schedules let the project manager know the impact of any delay at any step. This scheduling describes the importance of timely allocation of resources ...