Have you ever wondered about the most crucial step for effective project management? The answer lies in the baseline schedule. This is the key to the success of effective management of a project.
Following are some steps to review your baseline schedule:
- Scope of Work
It would be best if you read the scope of work once to make sure that you develop an understanding of it. It will also help you in recognizing all the project deliverables. Then, it would help if you summarized the scope into a group or a list of deliverables moving on. - Planning Procedure and Contract Document
Moving on, you should understand the sections of Project Administration and Project Coordination of the contract. You should make sure that the issued schedule tends to comply with the Planning Procedure and the Project Contract. - Schedule Log
You should review the schedule log within the tool that you have used. Make sure that activities’ predecessors must not be more than one. At the same time, activities without successors must not be more than one. If you are using retained logic, out-of-sequence activities must be zero, and activities with actual dates should be zero. In addition, there should be no milestone activities that have invalid relationships, unsatisfied relationships, and constraints. You must determine if all the constraints are valid or not. Valid constraints are typically contractual, and they are external milestones. It is worth noting that fixed constraints should be avoided as they can adversely influence the project. - Schedule Danglers and Logic
There is a need to have a deep understanding of the logical relationship between activities and work packages to ensure that the expected relationships are portrayed in the schedule. It would be best if you also looked for dangling activities and processes. However, there should be no danglers in the schedule as they tend to influence net float calculations. - Total Float
You need to review total float and remember that high total float implies poor logic relationships or open ends. Therefore, you should investigate a total float that is over 60 days. Ensure that all activities and processes with high total floats have suitable logic relationships. When wrong logic relationships exist, they tend to influence critical paths, project finish dates, and even critical milestone dates. - Lags
It would be best to filter all activities with lag unequal to zero. And if these lags are not described or explained in the document of Schedule Basis, you should ask for clarification. You should make sure that you agree with all the lags that have been used in the schedule. There is a need to minimize the lags used in the schedule. Rather than lags, you can always add activities to represent the tasks when possible. - Durations
There is a need to review activity durations. It is worth noting that significant durations tend to mask issues and errors. Therefore, all activities and processes with substantial durations must be divided into smaller durations. When using smaller durations, it becomes quite easy to measure and track their progress. Therefore, you should consider the use of more minor activities. - Soft Logic
When you review the Schedule Basis document, make sure that it lists all the soft logic links in the schedule. The document should also explain the reasons for their user in the project. - Assignment of Resources
If the schedule is loaded with resources, you should review the resources assignment to ensure that the right resources have been assigned and dedicated to activities and processes. In addition to it, you should check the usage of resources to make sure that resources are not overloaded in the schedule.
