The Control Schedule Process

 

Overview

You’re driving your car and hurrying to get to an important appointment. There are no delays, only green lights, and you’re optimistic you’ll be there on time. Then you see a large orange sign—Detour. Unsettled and a little angry, you veer onto an alternate route and your chances of being on time are gone.

 

That kind of sudden change can happen to your project schedule as well, making you take an “alternate route” that causes you to miss important deadlines. That can be unnerving, but hold on—there’s hope.

 

When your project schedule changes in an instant, look to the Control Schedule Process for help. The process gives you a strategy for effectively dealing with changes that occur in the life cycle of your project. Controlling the schedule means reviewing project documents to evaluate work performance and revising the schedule to keep the project on time. But HOW exactly do you to that? Let the PMBOK Guide – Sixth Edition show you the way.

 

Rationale/Purpose

A project schedule is very important for managing your project effectively, and controlling the schedule is essential for ensuring that your team is completing work in a timely manner. Controlling the schedule allows you to create work performance information, schedule forecasts and make changes and updates to existing documents.

 

Timing

This process is part of Monitoring and Controlling Process Group and it occurs at the time in the project life cycle when you track, review and regulate progress,  identify areas where you must make changes, and initiate those changes.

 

PM Role

As project manager, your role in the Control Schedule Process is to determine the status of the project schedule, make changes in the schedule and manage those changes.

 

Key Concepts

For the Control Schedule Process, you have to monitor the status of your project, update the project schedule and manage changes to the schedule baseline. To control the schedule, you need to review project documents and work performance data to understand your team’s performance to date.

 

When you control the project schedule, you ensure that all requested changes and preventive actions are processed through the Perform Integrated Change Process. You perform the Control Schedule Process throughout the project.

 

If you use an agile approach, you compare work completed against estimates for a given time period of the project. After you do that, you can reprioritize remaining project work and determine the rate at which deliverables are produced. You can also manage actual changes as they occur.

 

Impacts

Controlling the schedule may involve making changes through the Perform Integrated Change Control Process. This depends on how closely the work completed aligns with the schedule baseline.

 

Conclusion

Don’t let detours in your project schedule throw you off your intended route. By using the Control Schedule Process, you can track, review and regulate project performance and initiate changes that are required. Follow this process to navigate around roadblocks and arrive at your destination on schedule.   

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