Scheduling and Planning

CS 300 Lecture 3-1
Bart Massey

Planning

• Identifying what needs to be done

  • At the process level
  • At the project level

• Scheduling activities

• Building a Risk Management Plan

• Setting up monitoring and triggers

  

Process-Level Planning

• Identify the team

• Identify the process requirements

  • Outcomes

  • Deadlines / Milestones

    

Project-Level Planning

• Identify top-level activities

• Refine the activities to produce a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

  • Degree of refinement? fine-grained

• Elements of a task

  • Name
  • Estimated duration
  • Prerequisites
  • Dependents
  • Resource requirements
  • capacity

  • consumable

    

Scheduling

• Assigning times to tasks

• Must be consistent with prereqs, dependents, resources, deadlines

  • Essentially topological sort
  • Critical Path Method (CPM)
  • Slack allocation

• Standard terrible tool: Microsoft Project

  

Building a Risk Management Plan

• Identifying risks

  • Process vs project risks
  • Use cases and scenarios (!!)
  • Third-party help

• Analyzing risks

  • Get realistic likelihoods and severities
  • Eliminate risks when possible

• Recording risks

  • Risk monitoring plan
  • Triggers and ameliorations

• Risk Management Plan maintenance

  

Monitoring and Triggers

• Figure out what needs to be watched, write it down

• Check for it on schedule

• Useless without actions that can be taken

• Fix or fail early