My project has a weekly team meeting. Usually this is a conference call. However once a month we physically meet together in a big room. Today was one such physical meeting. Somebody from the project management side gave a brief overview of how the schedule (and changes to it) works.Some interesting facts are that we track both original and projected dates. This is for both the start and completion of every task. The funny thing is that most people on the project don’t know the difference between the two. Hopefully after out training today, everybody will at least have a basic understanding.
If there is a task that is not completed on time, and it will affect the critical path, we need to make a schedule update. This update is a lengthy process with negotiation between the stakeholders. We were told that being late, in and of itself, is not something that will get you in trouble. You just need to make sure you communicate any projected lateness early.
The schedule itself has most of the tasks we shall be undertaking. That alone is a significant accomplishment. The problem with our schedule is that there is no resource loading. For example, we have the tasks flagged in the schedule that are for our team. But there is not a mapping of the task to an individual. Hopefully there is at least a straw man effort to match high level effort with team sizes. But until this is more detailed, we are still going to be surprised with how closely we can track to the published schedule.
