The Public Relations of Project Management – Part 2: The Consumer Friendly Schedule

Is this a familiar sounding scenario? You rush through the planning phase trying to get to the answer of “when will the work be finished?”. You throw a schedule together with meticulous detail to determine that all important date, then promptly never look at it again. Or, you lay out the schedule according to the different teams that will be working on the project, or according to the different work life cycles, or some other scheme you think easy to update. Then when you take your project schedule into a meeting with executive stakeholders to report on status, one of them asks about the overall status of the XYZ component. Suddenly you find yourself scrambling to piece it together verbally on the fly from multiple sections of your schedule.
The project schedule is a key artifact of any project. It’s first function during planning is to determine the baseline milestone dates for the project, but it should be an active document that lives on throughout the project. It should always reflect the latest target milestone dates as well as updated progress towards those milestones. As such it serves as one of the primary communication tools on the project. Read more here.