Learn what a schedule is and what its main functions are!

Knowing what a schedule is and how to organize your functions is essential so that you can have a more organized life and well-defined strategic plans, in all areas of your life.

Have you ever been lost in so much of what you had to do? Did not know where to start? Or maybe you have not been able to meet a deadline for lack of strategic planning ?

If you have identified with any of these situations, know that you are not alone. This is not a peculiarity of yours, it has happened to me too!

But that changed when I began to create timelines for my tasks. And that's what I'm going to write about today.

In order for you to understand even more about how a good schedule works, we have separated in this article some topics full of information on the subject. Check it out!

• What is a schedule?
• Gantt Chart
• What are the objectives of the schedule?
• How to create a timeline?
• Schedule in MS Excel
• Schedule Management

So, do you know what the schedule is? What is the use, or how? If you answered no to any of these questions, continue reading this article and find out.

What is a schedule?

To understand what a timeline is, let's get to the origin of that word. It came from the Greek, which means "time" and grammar means "something written or drawn."

That is, timing is a representation, graphically or otherwise, of the time invested in a given task.

The timeline is a management tool that uses the concept of organizing activities. It can be used for both personal management and project management, for example.

Its most used graphic representation is in the form of the Gantt diagram. It consists of the representation of tasks in the form of bars on a time axis. And its main advantage is the ease of observing the start and end dates of each activity.

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Gantt Chart

O Gantt diagram, also known as Gantt chart, is a graph used to demonstrate the temporal advancement of a project.

It was developed by mechanical engineer Henry Gantt in 1917, aiming to be a production control tool. And, as we can already see, this goal was achieved with extreme mastery.

Examples of Gantt charts will be given in developing the timeline.

What are the objectives of the schedule?

There are many goals of the schedule, so I decided to list the ones that I think are more relevant, check it out!

• Identify and organize the chronological sequence of activities to be carried out to complete a project;
• Maintain clear deadlines for delivery of each task;
• Make evident the delay or advance of completion of all activity;
• Assist in the control in order to follow the planning;
• Predict more accurately a date for completing a project.

Now that you already know what the schedule is and what your goals are, how about learning how to create one?

How to create a timeline?

Firstly, the scope of the project, so that we do not lose sight of the activities to be performed. It is important to know exactly what the project covers or not.

For this, it is interesting to develop an EAP (Analytical Structure of the Project), with this becomes more visible all the activities that must be performed, as well as which activity is dependent on another activity.

With this task list, set the delivery times for each of these activities, and if one activity depends on the completion of another, also set the start date based on this. Now, just organize all these tasks in chronological order of execution.

Reviewing and maintaining a realistic schedule continues throughout the project as work progresses. It is possible to do all this manually or with the aid of some tool. In this post, I will present how to do it with two  tools.

Schedule in MS Excel

Now, I'll explain how to create a schedule in MS Excel. As I have already mentioned, you have to have the activities to be performed with the start dates and the duration time. With this, mount a table.

As an example, I set up the following table to be able to carry out the schedule assembly step by step.

In this example, the company will conduct a project review of its management model. Notice that the table has two series: start and duration. They guarantee the displacement and length of the timeline bars.

To insert the graph, let's select the entire range of the table> Insert> Graphs> Bars> Stacked bars.

We have to remove the fill from the "start" series because it is used as if it were an auxiliary column. You can also delete the grid lines and legend as well as change the color and style of the graphic so that it is visually pleasing.

To finalize our schedule, we have to reverse the order of activities, as our first schedule activity should be data collection.

To do this, simply select the vertical axis> Right-click> Format Axis> Categories in reverse order.

Timeline in MS Project

O MS Excel is very used to this task, however, we recommend that you use MS Project for such a task, since with it the work is simplified. Simply set the start dates and duration of each activity that the software generates the Gantt chart automatically, without the step-by-step presented for Excel.

To develop a timeline in an MS project you need to understand the process of analyzing dependencies, constraints between tasks, sequencing, durations, and assigned resources.

For this process there are some tools and techniques. Let's look at them:

Schedule network analysis

To perform this analysis, several analytical techniques are used, such as the critical path method, the critical chain method, "what-if" analysis, and the resource leveling to calculate the start dates and terminate sooner and later for the incomplete parts of the project activities.

Critical Path Method

This method calculates the theoretical start and end dates earlier, and later start and end, for all activities, without considering any resource limitations, performing an analysis of the paths to and from the network. schedule.

At any network path, schedule flexibility can be measured by the positive difference between dates later and earlier, and is called "total slack."

Critical paths have zero or negative total play, and scheduled  activities that are on the critical path are called "critical activities."

Critical chain method

Schedule network analysis technique that modifies the project schedule so that resource constraints are taken into account.

The critical path constrained by resources is known as the critical chain. The critical chain method, on the other hand, adds duration buffers that are activities without scheduled  work to manage the uncertainties. These buffers provide a slack in schedule.

Analysis of the "What if" scenario

This is an analysis of the question "What if the situation represented by the 'X' scenario happens?"

The result of this analysis can be used to assess whether the project schedule is feasible under adverse conditions and to prepare contingency and response plans to overcome or mitigate the impact of unexpected situations.

Application of anticipations and waits

The advance of some activities and waiting times can be made, as explained previously.

Compressing the Timeline

Shortening the project timeline without changing its scope is the issue of this topic. The purpose of this is to respect schedule constraints, imposed dates or other goals of the same.

There are two main methods: Compression and Parallelism. In the first one a trade-off between cost and term to know how we can reduce the term with the lowest cost.

In the second one, the execution of the execution is sequenced by the parallel execution of the activities .

Schedule Management

The following diagram summarizes the schedule management operation, showing the inputs and analyzes to be done before generating the project schedule.

• Network diagram analysis
• Critical path method
• Anticipations and waits
• Schedule compressions
• Scenario analysis

Entry of activities, durations, and resources into the scheduling tool generates a schedule with planned dates to complete the project activities.

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