Schedule Centered Planning: An Incremental Approach for Plan Driven Projects

The best way to assure the success of a project is to create a suitable project plan. The project plan is a vision of the future, a blueprint for how the project should proceed. A properly developed plan will provide a high degree of predictability of how the project will evolve, and the insights gained during planning will help the project manager to quickly and effectively deal with the unpredictable. Schedule Centered Planning is not a new approach, but it is unique, reflecting insights gained in 25 years of successfully managing projects. It recognizes that a properly developed schedule must reflect all other aspects of planning; it advocates iterative development so projects that cannot use Agile can still be Agile-like; and it stresses the concurrent nature of planning, i.e. that risk analysis must be performed in parallel with schedule development. When properly applied, the approach and the insights presented will greatly reduce, possible even eliminate the chaos that seems to be inevitable on too many projects. Included in the book is an appendix which shows how to use fields, filters, groups and views to turn Microsoft Project into a powerful planning tool, to create a schedule which truly is a project plan If you are new to planning, or if you manage large, complex projects, deal with multidisciplinary teams, or work in an environment where the focus is primarily on the schedule, then this book is for you.

Vincent McGevna has over 25 years of engineering project management experience, managing cross-functional engineering and manufacturing teams developing software, electronics and mechanical hardware in numerous high tech industries. Managing these large, complex projects has necessitated improving on standard planning techniques. Early on, long before Agile became popular, Vince embraced iterative development to incrementally build up the final product. He also learned the need to concurrently analyze risks while developing the schedule. These and other insights have been formalized and incorporated into his Schedule Centered Planning Process, which is documented in this book and in video training which is available at www.pmsuccess.com. Vince also became an expert in the use of Microsoft Project to facilitate the creation and management of many complex schedules. In his hands it is more than a scheduling tool it is a comprehensive project management tool. Vince has a certificate in Engineering Project Management from U.C Santa Cruz, is a Project Management Professional, PMP, and a Certified PRINCE2 Practitioner.