Master Schedule Vs Milestone Schedule - PMP Terminologies Continued

Here is the continuation of Time Management knowledge area.

Precedence vs logical relationship

While developing the relationship between the work packages or the activities, the Project Manager or the Project team members determine the activities what should come first and what next. This is developed by the method called the Precedence Diagramming Method or PDM. PDM graphically represents the activities using boxes.

The boxes which are representing the activities are linked based on the dependency. This is called logical relationship. There are four types of dependencies. Finish to Start, Start to finish, Start to Start and Finish to Finish.

Master schedule vs Milestone schedule

Summary level schedule which highlights the principal activities and their estimated duration is called Master schedule. This schedule helps in early communication among stakeholders in particular senior management. The schedule is also useful for facilitating team brainstorming during the initial phrases of the project to work out logistics.

A milestone is a significant event in the project usually marked by the completion of a major deliverable. The milestone schedule is used for reporting status reports to top level management and external stakeholders.  And also the milestone schedule allows the project team leader to review and identify all of the significant and major project related milestones that may come during the course of a project.

Progressive elaboration vs Rolling wave planning

At the beginning of the project, near term deliverables are decomposed into individual components and defined at the greatest level of detail while the deliverables that comes later will be defined at a higher level.

For example a project having 4 phases, may be phase 1 and 2 are decomposed in detailed and while the activities are in progress that is during execution phase, the details of phase 3 and phase 4 deliverables are defined.  This type of project management approach is particularly useful when the availability of information needed to plan future work packages in detail is predicated on the successful completion of previous project phases. This is called Rolling Wave Planning.

Progressive elaboration is used in which the plan for the particular and designated project is being continuously and constantly modified, detailed, and improved as newer and more sets of information becomes available to the project management team.

Project Buffer vs Feeding buffer

A project buffer is inserted at the end of the project network between the last task and the completion date. Any delays on the longest chain of dependent tasks will consume some of the buffer but will leave the completion date unchanged and so protect the project.

Delays on paths of tasks feeding into the longest chain can impact the project by delaying a subsequent task on the Critical Chain. To protect against this, feeding buffers are inserted between the last task on a feeding path and the Critical Chain.

Resource Loading vs Resource Levelling

Resource loading is assigning activities to resource/man power. In resource loading, each employee is assigned a task or a percentage of a project. With resource loading, a project manager can predict an employee's hours for the year and see how tasks can be assigned. This also allows the project manager to decide whether or not additional employees or contractors are needed to complete the scheduled projects.

Resource leveling

Resource Leveling deals with both time (starting and ending date) and resources, including manpower and budget. Resource leveling tries to balance the conflicting interests of projects with the available resources. Resource leveling generally breaks things down into two categories: time and available resources. Some projects need to be finished within a certain time frame. These projects will use all the available resources (money and manpower) to complete the project by a certain date.

Advantages

Less day-to to-day manipulation

Better morale, fewer problems/costs

Levels costs, simplifies budgeting and funding

Work Performance Information vs Work Performance Measurement

Work performance Information is the output of execution like status of deliverables, schedule progress, cost incurred, implementation of the corrective/changed requests, risk status, seller’s information in terms of procurement etc.

Work Performance Measurement

Work Performance Measurement is the output of Monitoring and control. They are used to generate graph or metrics like Cost Variance (CV), Schedule Variance (SV), forecasts like ETC, EAC.

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