Practice Standard for Scheduling | Standards of Practice

Practice Standard for Scheduling | Worthless but free

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Practice Standard ...

	Practice Standard for Scheduling Project Management Inst, 2007 - 113 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews
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Standards of Practice

The Practice Standard for Scheduling has been developed as a complement to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) in the Knowledge Area of Time Management. This describes the standards of practice related to scheduling, methods that are generally recognized as good practice for most of the projects most of the time, following the PMBOK style and notation.

This Practice Standard is designed to provide those familiar with the PMBOK Guide a summary of the benefits of a well developed and maintained schedule, which also describes components and provides a quantifiable means of assessing a schedule.

Chapters: 1 - Intro (1 pg), 2 - Schedule development process (6 pgs), 3 - Good Practices (9 pgs), 4 - Scheduling Components (i.e. 33 page alphabetic listing of items and characteristics: name, required/optional, calculated/manual, data format, behaviour description, good practices, associated component, definition), 5 - Conformance Index (2 pgs, and Conformance Scoring in App d), plus lengthy Glossary (20 pgs).

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Worthless but free

You can download the read-only pdf version of this on the PMI website for free, so unless you've just got to have a hard copy, not sure why you'd want to actually pay for this. If you do want a hard copy, do yourself a favor and read through the pdf version first. You'll probably find that you don't want to spend the money. Speaking of money, on the PMI website, this thing goes for $38 (PMI member price). On Amazon, it's 26 bucks and you get free supersaver shipping. That begs the question, why is it cheaper for Amazon to buy it from PMI and sell it to you versus PMI selling it to you directly?

As far as content goes, it's pretty much the same old poorly written junk that comes from PMI. But since they're the PMI, it's okay because they must be experts in project management. It provides absolutely no practical advice, it's repetitive, and in some cases, it's just wrong. For example, in chapter 4, it sets out to describe all of the "scheduling components." One section under that is for Constraints (e.g., start no earlier than, start no later than, as soon as possible, etc.). Under "Good Practices" for each and every constraint type, it repeats the same thing, "Constraints must not be a replacement for schedule network logic. The As Soon AS Possible constraint should be used sparingly." You can replace "As Soon As Possible" with any constraint you want - it says the same thing over and over. Mostly that's true. If you're using scheduling software, hard constraints like "Must Finish On" or "Finish no later than" can cause problems if you want to keep your schedule dynamic; however, at the very least, you'll always have to use either As Soon As Possible or Start No Earlier Than for every task. If a task has a predecessor, then at that very least, you must start as soon as possible after the predecessor is complete. If, for some reason, it doesn't have a predecessor, then it must have at the least a Start no Earlier than date. Since this practice standard states that "Good Practice" dictates that every task (other than the start and end milestones) should have at least one predecessor and one successor, then it is contradicting to tell you to use As Soon As Possible constraints "sparingly". Anyway, if you're someone without much scheduling experience, I think this "standard" will only confuse you. If you want to learn about scheduling, probably a book like "Dynamic Scheduling with MS Office Project 200X" would be better (assuming you're using MS Project) or a book on Primavera or whatever tool you're using. If you're not using any tools, then managing and controlling a large schedule would be difficult at best, so good luck.

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