What should a project timeline include?
The question is very broad. What is meant by timeline? I guess that’s the project schedule we’re talking about here. Based on this assumption, a project can have a milestone schedule (as part of the master plan), a monthly schedule for the entire project or 1-3 months, or a weekly plan with micro-planned activities for daily execution. What is the timeline or schedule that will help us complete the project? I guess this is the important thing here and we should keep asking ourselves that.
To run a project, we need to have an overview milestone chart that tells you what are the major milestones that need to be achieved in the project or project phase. From here, each milestone event can be worked backwards to reach no. of months needed to get there (either from the start of the project to the 1st milestone or between 2 milestones). This can be the monthly plan for x months duration to reach the first/next milestone. Can you run the project with this?
Well yes we can. But to execute and monitor a project closely, a monthly schedule can be larger in scale or magnitude, and there is a chance that the project team will lose track. A monthly schedule broken down into weekly schedules or plans with micro activities planned for 6 days, offers visibility and can be controlled. It could also be a two week plan depending on the project.
In this way, the project can be closely monitored as we have now reduced it to daily activities, anticipating and preparing for impediments, learning daily lessons, implementing corrective/preventive actions daily (whenever possible), etc. By using a daily to-do list (the latest itemized project schedule) where the day’s activities are listed by trade (for example, in construction it could be MEP, HVAC, superstructure, substructure or whoever is currently on the job). job), we can get commitments from them for their day job. Any activity not completed is graded with feedback on why it was not completed and the lessons learned from that. That activity is included in the Next Day’s List.
To-do lists are the monitoring and control units of the project and are also used as communication tools to disseminate information to stakeholders, especially Management, to make quick decisions to move the project forward. Management also gets to know the weekly plan vs. product achieved, as well as the various reasons why the activities were not completed as a preventive measure in the future.