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As a scheduler within various industries, I have been asked “What is Schedule Quality?” In fact, if you pose this question to various project personnel, you may receive more than one answer per individual! Why? Some view “schedule quality” as a simple series of measures and techniques. I believe that the pursuit of schedule quality is a multi-front battle.

I met  a lovely old guy last week at a Fleetwood Mac concert at Madison Square Gardens who was an Attendant there. We got talking while I was getting a beer and he told me he'd worked there for forty years, he remembered when Fleetwood Mac first played there 20 years ago, Led Zeppelin filmed Song Remains the Same, Rolling Stones tours, he'd seen them all, I was very envious.

The simple fact ignored by most accountants, general management and project managers is that cost is an output from the management process, and pretending cost is a manageable input is a recipe for disaster.

One of the more common discussions on the web and in other places is focused on arguing the merits of, or comparing, the PRINCE2 Methodology with the PMBOK Methodology.

Most people with an interest will know that PMI have released the PMBOK® Guide 5^thEdition, the Standard for Program Management 3^rdEdition and the Standard for Portfolio Management 3^rdEdition, with an official publication date ofthe 31^stDecember 2012. PMI’s other key standard; the Organisational Project Management Maturity Model (OPM3) is in the review and pre-press stage for publication later this year.

If my team and I were on a mission to standardize our program control software, we might perform a benchmarking exercise. I firmly believe if we performed such an exercise, we would find that one-hundred different organizations would have at least one-hundred-five software architectures between them. In fact, that may be optimistic.

The scheduling conundrum is simple:

We know effective scheduling makes a significant difference to project success and we know what effective scheduling looks like but in most projects, the schedule is ignored, bad scheduling practice is the norm and most projects finish late.

Probably the most common action undertaken by project planners everywhere is assigning a duration to a task; most of us do this almost automatically. Generally it is only when a dispute arises that the complex interaction of the factors discussed involved in setting the duration come into play.

There is no universal answer to the question of what is the ‘correct’ way to assess durations but here is an overview of the multiple factors that should be considered by competent planners and managers.

Distributed contingencies are normal in most aspects of project management but often result in sub-optimal use of resources. Typical examples include allowing some safety margin in each CPM duration estimate (eg, setting the durations at an 80% probability), allowing contingencies on a project by project basis for risk, setting budgets with a 90% confidence limit, etc.