4.2 Project Planning Part 2

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Hello and welcome to Lesson four, Part two

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of the Project Lifecycle Project Planning and building a Project Schedule.

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As we remember from the previous video,

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we look at

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what would what a project scheduled potentially look like if we were having to build a cup of coffee,

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which is kind of a good illustration, but obviously not terribly topical to enterprise Project management.

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So in this lesson, what we're gonna do is actually use the Project charter for the Maze video game

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to build a project schedule.

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Now the

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Project Management scheduling tool of choice is Microsoft Project. It's pretty universal throughout the

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the business world,

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but for those of you that don't have Microsoft Project, it is also very expensive. And so you can see here that there's a couple of online tools that air free. I'm gonna use Team Gant

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for today's lesson.

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Uh, the team Week one is also pretty good. If you're in a small to medium sized organization, you also may want to look at Smartsheet. Smartsheet has, ah, a lot of really good collaborative options for building a project schedule,

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so the idea here is kind of truthful.

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One is to build

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a schedule that is indicative of

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the dependencies and processes and what must go first on what must go second and so on.

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And the other side of that coin is that we want to

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create a schedule in some sort of environment

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that is, hopefully collaborative enough that my project resource is a k a. The people doing the work

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have either some say into the schedule or

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have some sort of system notification, letting them know that they've been assigned a task.

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Um, and we'll get into some of that in more detail here in a minute,

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with one weakness. That Microsoft Project has in this environment is, unless you have

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Microsoft Project Server, which is a full project in portfolio management system, you tend to have difficulty communicating the task assignments

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to the normal for lack of better expression worker bees

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who would be engaged in the day to day activities of the project. So you either end up manually creating e mails or tasks and outlook. There's an ad on that you can get for M s project that will automatically create a task and assign it to your resource is there's some different ways to do it, but it

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end up being

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somewhat manual. So some of the new online tools actually have advantages for your small to medium sized organizations because you can gain additional collaboration abilities without the drastic expense of a Microsoft Project server. So again, I'm gonna use Team Gant.

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Feel free to use

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again, charting tool

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our scheduling tool of your choice. We're going to do this

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in a fairly waterfall fashion. So those of you that air

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more agile minded, don't worry. We'll talk about Angela later on in the course. But just for this example, we're gonna use sort of a waterfall schedule.

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So here I've got the team Gant up. If you want to pause the video at this time and go ahead and go through the process of signing up for Team Gant and going through the little tutorial and whatnot, you'll eventually get to the GAN chart. Looks something like this, and then you can go ahead and push play on the video.

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So what I'm looking at here is sort of a default

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gan chart. I've added a couple of different groups. If you'll notice here, I've got these groups that have task that live underneath them.

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These ones don't have any on there yet.

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And so

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I'm just in the initial stage of trying to build out what it is that I want to do. And if you recall the term that I used earlier, the progressive elaboration, what we're going to do in this schedule and we won't spend a ton of time going all the way down the rabbit hole. But we'll go

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into some details that you can kind of see how this process

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is broken down. So these larger groups are really the

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the major efforts. And if you reflect back to the project charter for the maze game,

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you'll notice that under team assignments, I kind of have four big chunks of work, put four different teams and what they have to do.

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What I'm gonna do in these in this group field is go ahead and add those

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here.

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And this is actually gonna change that this project management and this is just reflecting that we have a project management task. They're gonna occur throughout the course of the project

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on. Then we have, of course, the window poor team that has to do some work to set up

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the shell of our system, our video game.

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We've got the Game 14 and they're going to be,

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um,

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working on the actual game functionality inside of that window show. And then we have the graphics team and they're going to be doing the user interface of this particular software game.

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So now you can see that my first passed through the GAN chart process is really just getting the organization of

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what is my highest level of abstraction. And in this case, it's those four teams.

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So then, if you scroll through in your project charter and you go to the Windows Main process map,

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you'll notice there's a lot of different steps again, starting from top left, going to bottom, right?

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So within the Windows Core team, what I can do is actually start

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putting those tasks in there because those are the unique pieces of work

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that are going to need to be done in order to create

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my system at the Windows level, right,

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so create our free window load graphics,

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build tables

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and then play the game.

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And so I'm not gonna go through all of them,

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so you'll see here than I've got these four tasks, and they've got these little progress Bar's so

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one of the other things that you'll want to do for each of these tasks is sort of determined

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what the order is as well as how long with the duration of those tasks. And you can look at this and say a list for you.

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And most systems have the same kind of thing where you can kind of see

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what the started in dates are. Um, and before doing that, what I'll do is go to the gang. And

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now this process would be happening

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in an interview process between me and the project team. And they might say, OK,

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it's gonna take me You know, in this case, they're showing four days to create the window,

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and they'll say, and that's fine. But I can't

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build anything with the load graphics

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until

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the create window is complete. So in this particular software, you use these little dots here just to connect the two and show that there's a dependency there. And the reason why that matters is if I try to push the schedule, you'll notice how that dependency turned red, and that's just illustrating to the project manager that

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you can't overlap those two tasks because the beginning of one is dependent upon the completion of the other

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on certain Maur expensive systems like your Microsoft project and whatnot. They actually will automatically move these things around for years, so it's a little bit more user friendly.

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In the case of bill tables. Again, I'm in my interview with the developers, and they tell me that they can

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start building the tables as soon as the create window is complete. So then, Aiken, connect those two and show that I can actually back this up

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and have those two tasks being done concurrently, thereby reducing my overall time for this project.

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And then, in the case of the play game,

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they tell me that No, they have to have everything done before. They can actually do the play game portion of the build, okay,

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and so on and so on. And that's how we're going to be progressively elaborating. And we're going to get those durations from the same group, Um,

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as we go further and further through the process.