Developing the Project Schedule

The Develop Schedule process is the heart of the Planning process group. This is where you lay out the schedule for your project activities, determine their start and finish dates, and finalize activity sequences and durations. Develop Schedule, along with Estimate Activity Resources and Estimate Activity Durations, is repeated several times before you actually come up with the project schedule. Most project management software programs today can automatically build a schedule for you once you’ve entered the needed information for the activities. The project schedule, once it’s approved, serves as the schedule baseline for the project that you can track against in later processes.

Remember that you cannot perform Develop Schedule until you have completed at least the following processes of the Planning process group: Collect Requirements, Define Scope, Create WBS, Define Activities, Sequence Activities, Estimate Activity Durations, and Develop Human Resource Plan. In practice, it’s also beneficial to perform Identify Risks, Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis, Perform Quantitative Risk Analysis, Plan Risk Responses, and Plan Procurements prior to developing the schedule.