Question

As mentioned in the textbook, there is a belief by many in the agile community that scheduling is something that should be done more tactically by the team as opposed to by a project manager as an activity early in the project. Based on the insights you have gained from the book and you Internet research, what are the most significant pros and cons for doing project scheduling early, even in the face of growing project change. Provide concrete examples for both the pros and cons along with solid supporting evidence.

Answer 1

Project scheduling is basically the listing project's key milestones, activities, deliverables with probable start and finish date. Project schedule is dependent of lot of other information as in resource estimation, complexity of work, project deadline, dependency on other activities, etc. That is why the pros and cons of project schedule will depend on the kind of information that is available beforehand.

Some of the pros of scheduling a project beforehand are:

1. Clear understanding of tasks and sub tasks: While creating a project schedule you need to have a clear understanding of the different tasks and problems that need to be solved. Once you breakdown the business problem into sub-problems, you have clear understanding of the tasks and activities required to solve those problems. Creating a schedule before the start of the projects forces you to frontload all your thought and define the business problem clearly

2. Accountability: Once you have an understanding of all the problems and sub-problems, you can assign team members to each of these problems. Through this you can clearly define the accountability of each and every team member

3. Adherence to the project timline: Defining teh timeline before the start of the project helps in building the accountability within the team members. And thus chances are high you will deliver the project within stipulated timelines

Cons:

However the project schedule and plan needs to be updated week over week. Specifically when there are changes in the business requirements and corresponding change in the project scope. Usually to build a project schedule, you need below information:

• Project Scope
• List and squence of activities
• Dependencies on the tasks and activities
• Crtical path i.e. the most optimized timeline considering the bottlenecks
• Key milestones and deliverables

In case any of the above information is missing while designing the project schedule, the project plan is bound to fail

With changing business requirements, its difficult to plan the project properly and you are bound to make mistakes. Either you will end up force fitting some tasks and activities or miss out on some

With continuous project changes, the project plan and schedule needs to be updated on a regular basis. While doing so, you end up spending lot of time on creating the project schedule only