Do I have a good schedule?

Confused by the schedule? There's only a few rules to follow to ensure that a project schedule makes sense

Philosophy

While not all team members on a project team need to understand a project schedule, it should be simple enough that a PM (Program/Project Manager) who is completely unfamiliar with the project is able to look at a schedule and figure out basics such as key milestones, view the critical path, etc. Some of the schedules I've seen, while good enough for the PM managing the project, is really difficult for other people to read.

I've been on projects where by the middle of a four-month project, the milestones are still missing predecessors & successors so critical paths are incomplete, red diamonds don't display even though the milestones will be missed, half the project contains ghost tasks, etc. If none of these points make sense, it'll become clearer in the upcoming blogs.

It may make sense at the beginning of a project to have an incomplete schedule, when a lot of the tasks needed to flesh out the schedule have not been identified. So yes, schedule development is a knowledge creation process: you learn more about the tasks needed to complete the project as you get deeper into the project. But by the middle of the project, you better have 90% of your schedule compliant with the content & presentation criteria below.

On my projects though, I typically have my schedule compliant with the criteria below at the beginning of a project even though I may only know 50% of the tasks needed to complete. You really don't need to know 100% of the tasks to have a good schedule. For me, a "good" schedule is one compliant with the following content & presentation criteria.

Content criteria

1. Do you know the requested date for the last milestone (here)?
2. Are there 3-7 milestones (duration = 0 days) in the entire project (here)?
3. Are milestones strategically positioned throughout the schedule?
4. Do milestones have deadlines assigned to them?
5. With the exception of the last milestone, are all milestones family tasks?
   • Family task = task with predecessor (parent) + successor (child)
6. Is the final milestone a sterile task?
   • Sterile task = task with parent but no child task
7. Are there only non-ghost tasks at the task level (i.e., non-summary tasks)?
   • Ghost task = task with no parent or child task
8. Is there a justification for having every single sterile task?
9. Is the info column clear of red diamond icons?
   • Red diamond = task will not meet assigned deadline

Presentation criteria

1. Are the following columns displayed?
   • Info
   • % complete
   • Start
   • Finish on Time
   • Task Name
   • Duration
   • Start
   • Finish
   • Predecessor
   • Successor
   • Resource Names
2. Do the project's main phases visually stand out?
3. Do late finish indicators show only green tasks?
4. Do light-bulb indicators show active tasks?
5. Are only incomplete tasks displayed?
6. Do all summary tasks have a maximum of seven tasks?
7. Are all major phases in the schedule visually separated from the rest of the schedule e.g., using highlighting?
8. Will tasks in the critical path for a milestone automatically turn red when a milestone deadline will be missed?
9. Do all summary tasks contain a maximum of 5-7 tasks?

The presentation criteria is somewhat subjective. You may have your own presentation style. But what I'm listing as the criteria is what I've compiled over the last 15 years from other PMs who have had schedules that were easy to follow.

In the coming months, I'll blog in detail about why each criteria helps make your schedule simpler and easier to follow.