Your schedule is one of the most important documents you will produce. It’s important to know for the PMP Certification Exam and is a key component in managing stakeholder expectations. It tells team members when they will be performing work, the type of work they will perform, whom team members will be working with, and how long the work should take.
Your schedule also tells the customer when deliverables can be reviewed and when to expect a finished product. And the schedule lets management know when the project reviews are scheduled and how the team is doing in meeting its timelines.
However, as much time as you spend developing this very important document, you will spend even more time updating and controlling the schedule. This is all about staying on schedule and influencing all the variables that could cause a schedule variance.
Control Schedule. Monitoring the status of the project activities to update project progress and manage changes to the schedule baseline to achieve the plan.
Schedule Model. A representation of the plan for executing the project’s activities — including durations, dependencies, and other planning information — used to produce a project schedule along with other scheduling artifacts.
Project Schedule. An output of a schedule model that presents linked activities with planned dates, durations, milestones, and resources.
Schedule Baseline. The approved version of a schedule model that can be changed only through formal change control procedures and is used as a basis for comparison to actual results.
Schedule Management Plan. A component of the project management plan that establishes the criteria and the activities for developing, monitoring, and controlling the schedule.
The schedule baseline is your commitment to the sponsor and the customer about when to expect certain deliverables, phase gates, and due dates. The project schedule is what you use to manage the day-to-day project. The project schedule is likely to be adjusted on a fairly regular basis. The schedule baseline should change only in response to a change request that has gone through the Perform Integrated Change Control process.