Best Practice 9: Updating the Schedule Using Actual Progress and Logic
“Statusing” is the process of updating a plan with actual dates, logic, and progress and adjusting forecasts of the remaining effort. Statusing the schedule is fundamental to efficient resource management and requires an established process to provide continual and realistic updates to the schedule. Updates should be regular and fully supported by team members and program management.
The benefits of updating the schedule on a regular basis include
knowledge of whether activities are complete, in progress, or late and the effect of variances on remaining effort;
continually refined duration estimates for remaining activities using actual progress, duration, and resource use;
the current status of total float and critical path activities; and
the creation of trend reports and analyses to highlight actual and potential problems.
The time between status updates depends on the program’s duration, complexity, and risk, as well as the detail in the IMS. Updating the schedule too often will misuse team members’ time and will provide little value to management, but updating too infrequently makes it difficult to respond to actual events. The schedule may be updated less frequently in the beginning of a program, then more frequently as it progresses and as more resources begin working on activities.
Program managers should consider tracking progress in the schedule more frequently than the reporting period. For example, if the reporting period is monthly, schedule progress should be updated weekly. If schedule status is being reported weekly, then progress should be tracked daily. Tracking progress at a lower level than the reporting period allows management insight into the causes of issues that are being reported before the end of the reporting period. In Best Practice 4, we discuss the importance of keeping near-term durations shorter than the reporting period.
The schedule should reflect actual progress as well as other information such as actual start and finish dates, forecasted dates, and logic changes. Activity owners provide these data to the scheduler. To ensure that the schedule is properly updated, responsibility for changing or statusing the schedule should be assigned to someone who has the proper training and experience in CPM scheduling. Certain scheduling software packages may appear to be easy to use at first, but a schedule constructed by an inexperienced user may hide or ignore fundamental network logic errors and erroneous statusing assumptions. Once an update has been made, management should assess its accuracy to verify that all finished work is in the past and all unfinished work is scheduled for the future.
Statusing the schedule should not be confused with revising the schedule. Statusing involves updating the schedule with actual facts and comparing those facts against a plan, such as events on certain dates and the progress of work with a certain number of resources. After the schedule is statused, management may want to revise the plan for remaining work by, for example, changing the sequence of activities or adding activities. That is, statusing the schedule involves updating it with actual data, while revising the schedule focuses on adjusting future work.
Appropriate time for revising the schedule must be included in the update process. Otherwise, maintaining the stability of the schedule will be difficult. It is useful for teams to create calendars for scheduling updates and revisions. The concepts of altering the plan based on knowledge gained or actual performance are referred to as either replanning or rebaselining, depending on the program’s approach to change control. These concepts are discussed further in Best Practice 10.