Schedule Projects › How to Develop Project Schedules

How to Develop Project Schedules

Following are some steps that you might use to develop a realistic schedule:

1. Adjust resource calendars to define work days and holidays for each resource.
2. Autoschedule the project without constraints on resource availability.
3. Autoschedule the project again with constraints on resource availability to eliminate resource overcommitment.
4. Prioritize phases, activities, and tasks.
5. Recalculate the duration of inherently overcommitted tasks, keeping in mind that you cannot recalculate the duration of tasks with fixed resource assignments.
6. Lock tasks that you do not want rescheduled.
7. Refine your use of resource loading patterns.
8. Adjust task priority.
9. Autoschedule the project again with constraints to resource availability.
10. If needed, do one of the following, and Autoschedule the project again:
    • Manually adjust the schedule by shifting tasks.
    • Refine dependency relationships.