PP.SP 2.1 Establish the Budget and Schedule
Summary
Establish and maintain the project’s budget and schedule.
Description
The project’s budget and schedule are based on developed estimates and ensure that budget allocation, task complexity, and task dependencies are appropriately addressed.
Event driven, resource-limited schedules have proven to be effective in dealing with project risk. Identifying accomplishments to be demonstrated before initiation of an event provides some flexibility in the timing of the event, a common understanding of what is expected, a better vision of the state of the project, and a more accurate status of the project’s tasks.
Example Work Products
- Project schedules
- Schedule dependencies
- Project budget
Subpractices
1. Identify major milestones.
Milestones are pre-planned events or points in time at which a thorough review of status is conducted to understand how well stakeholder requirements are being met. (If the project includes a developmental milestone, then the review is conducted to ensure that the assumptions and requirements associated with that milestone are being met.) Milestones can be associated with the overall project or a particular service type or instance. Milestones can thus be event based or calendar based. If calendar based, once agreed, milestone dates are often difficult to change.
2. Identify schedule assumptions.
When schedules are initially developed, it is common to make assumptions about the duration of certain activities. These assumptions are frequently made on items for which little if any estimation data are available. Identifying these assumptions provides insight into the level of confidence (i.e., uncertainties) in the overall schedule.
3. Identify constraints.
Factors that limit the flexibility of management options should be identified as early as possible. The examination of the attributes of work products and tasks often bring these issues to the surface. Such attributes can include task duration, resources, inputs, and outputs.
4. Identify task dependencies.
Frequently, the tasks for a project or service can be accomplished in some ordered sequence that minimizes the duration. This sequencing involves the identification of predecessor and successor tasks to determine optimal ordering.
- Critical Path Method (CPM)
- Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)
- Resource-limited scheduling
- Customer priorities
- Marketable features
- End-user value
5. Establish and maintain the budget and schedule.
- Defining the committed or expected availability of resources and facilities
- Determining the time phasing of activities
- Determining a breakout of subordinate schedules
- Defining dependencies among activities (predecessor or successor relationships)
- Defining schedule activities and milestones to support project monitoring and control
- Identifying milestones, releases, or increments for the delivery of products to the customer
- Defining activities of appropriate duration
- Defining milestones of appropriate time separation
- Defining a management reserve based on the confidence level in meeting the schedule and budget
- Using appropriate historical data to verify the schedule
- Defining incremental funding requirements
- Documenting project assumptions and rationale
6. Establish corrective action criteria.
Criteria are established for determining what constitutes a significant deviation from the project plan. A basis for gauging issues and problems is necessary to determine when corrective action should be taken. Corrective actions can lead to replanning, which may include revising the original plan, establishing new agreements, or including mitigation activities in the current plan. The project plan defines when (e.g., under what circumstances, with what frequency) the criteria will be applied and by whom.