Best Practices Checklist: Capturing All Activities

• A WBS is the cornerstone of the program schedule. Its elements are linked to one another with logical relationships and lead to the end product or final delivery. The schedule clearly reflects the WBS and defines the activities necessary to produce and deliver each product.

• The schedule reflects all effort (steps, events, work required, and outcomes) to accomplish the deliverables described in the program’s work breakdown structure.

• The IMS includes planning for all activities that have to be accomplished for the entire duration of the program, including all blocks, increments, phases, and the like.

• The IMS includes the summary and intermediate and all detailed schedules. The same schedule serves as the summary, intermediate, and detailed schedule by simply rolling up lower levels of effort into summary activities or higher-level WBS elements.

• The government-owned detailed schedule includes all activities the government, its contractors, and others must perform to complete the work, including receipt of government-furnished equipment or information, deliverables, or services from other programs.

• The schedule contains primarily detail activities, and milestones are not used to represent work.

• If the government program management office and its contractor use different scheduling software packages, a process is defined to preserve integrity between the different schedule formats, and the converted data are verified and validated when the schedules are updated.

• Level-of-effort (LOE) activities represent effort that has no measurable output and cannot be associated with a physical product or defined deliverable.

• Activity names contain noun-verb combinations, are descriptive, and are clear enough to identify their associated product without the need to review high-level summary or predecessor activity names.

• Activities within the schedule are easily traced to key documents and other information through activity or task codes.