Optimization of Project Schedule Planning

Duration Optimization

Here, the project manager and team take a critical look at the draft schedule and seek ways to improve it, to make it more accurate, realistic, effective, and efficient by means of attacking such problems as follows.

• Errors. Are all time estimates realistic? Pay particular attention to time estimates for tasks on the critical path.Also, review the relationships between tasks.Does your schedule reflect the fact that some tasks may have to start simultaneously and others cannot start until some other task is completed or partially completed?
• Oversights. Have any tasks or subtasks been left out of the WBS? Has time for training and maintenance been overlooked in the schedule?
• Overcommitments.A review may find that some employees would have to work ten to twelve hours per day for months on end to complete the tasks assigned to them in the schedule.If you find such overcommitments, redistribute parts of the load.
• Bottlenecks. A bottleneck is any task that causes the work feeding it to pile up.Think of an auto assembly line that has to stop periodically because the people who install the seats cannot keep up with the pace of the line.The usual way to handle this is to improve the work process used in that task, or to shift resources into that task.
• Imbalances in the workload. A schedule review may indicate that some team members are being asked to carry more than their share of the load while others are being asked to do very little.Balancing the load could reduce the overall schedule.
• Opportunities to reduce the schedule. Because tasks on the critical path define the duration of the entire project, look very carefully at them.You may be able to shorten them by shifting more of your resources to them as in the bottleneck problem.It may be possible to take these resources from non-critical-path that has four to five days of slack time, shift some or all of those people onto a critical-path task for several days.

Cost Optimization

Project management should be provided with periodic financial reports to assist with early remedial decisionmaking.The importance of adequate feedback systems for the estimation of future work should not be overlooked.

Where the project program requires to be compressed, it may be beneficial to examine the most economical way in which this can be achieved.The technique of cost optimization utilizes critical path analysis to determine those activities on the critical path that are cheapest to expedite.Time reduction along the critical path will eventually use all the spare time on non-critical paths and therefore they also become critical.Further time reduction will require buying time from more than on critical path.As this process continues, the time reduction becomes more expensive and activities will progressively reach their crash times where further time reduction becomes impossible.Eventually, the point is reached where no further time reduction is possible and the project is then at its ultimate crash time.Thus, it is sensible for project managers to strive to find the most economical way to realize duration compression.

Resource Optimization

No combination of resource scheduling optimization capabilities can be assured of delivering the best results for any situation.The various smoothing capabilities will usually deliver better utilization of resources on paper.

It is essentially what resource managers do on a project.They look at the planned schedule for the immediate future, and at the available resources.They try to figure out the best way to get the necessary scheduled work done, when required, within resource limits.When they find a situation that does not support these criteria, they look at slipping tasks, using overtime, or reassigning work to less loaded resources.

Hence, sponsors and project managers should have access to the right resources, based on the project phase, task requirements and competencies needed.The availability and commitment of the resources should be guaranteed by senior management once the project is approved and resourced.

Resource optimization is achieved by a systematic utilization of the floats of non-critical activities.A common method for resource optimization involves the following three steps:

• Identify unused work time of resources.
• Identify activities that can be scheduled into that time.
• Match the resources with activities and make the assignments.