Hi all,
My name is Alexander and I am from Australia. I am what I would consider a junior scheduler (compared some of you very experienced folk) and I work on a variety of projects, mainly in the ICT space. I really love scheduling and project controls as it ensures project risk is managed with quantified metrics.
I wish to seek guidance on how best to hold a detailed planning workshop for the projects I am currently working with. I have been brought in to conduct programme scheduling for a group of projects that range from Policy, ICT and Legislation.
The projects I am dealing with have not been following good practice, and as a result do not have basic artefacts I can work off such as schedules, WBS and even agreement on what deliverables they are working on! Not to mention their original deadline dates have slipped by about 12 months. Crazy.
Now, I need to conduct detailed planning to develop schedules for each of the projects.
My question is, what is the best way to conduct a general detailed planning workshop for a project? Is the way I am currently doing considered a good approach?
My current process, using a Miro Board for visual collaboration is to:
1. Specify what the deliverables are that need to be delivered;
2. Once deliverables are specified, specify what milestones need to be achieved within each deliverable and in which order (also which milestones are dependent on other milestones at a general level);
3. Once milestones are determined, specify which activities need to be completed respective to each individual milestone. The activities are also sequenced for achieving each milestone;
4. Once activities are determined for each activity, lay them all out in the Miro board and sequence them based on the order of the milestones from step 3 above and link dependencies;
5. specify which resources are allocated to each activity and based on the resources, what the duration of those activities are.
At a high level, would you consider this a good practice approach to scheduling? Am I missing anything or could I add anything to my process? Alternatively, what is the process YOU follow for the same type of workshop?
I would really benefit from collective input of this community as for me it is heard to learn on the job from other more experienced schedulers when I am usually the only one on the engagement.
Thank you all.
- Alexander