There is a significant amount of preliminary work that goes into developing a schedule for the project. The PMP Certification Exam considers this to be a very important aspect of any project. You will most likely need to revisit the processes numerous times before you get a schedule that’s acceptable to all your stakeholders.
You might need to go back to your network diagram to look for ways to compress the duration by overlapping activities by using leads and lags and modifying the dependency relationships. You can also inquire into getting more resources as a way to shorten the duration.
In other words, developing the schedule is an iterative process that you might need to go through several times before you have a schedule that everyone can live with.
Develop Schedule. Analyzing activity sequences, durations, resource requirements, and schedule constraints to create the project schedule model.
To begin this process, you take outputs from the previous scheduling processes:
Schedule management plan
Activity list
Activity attributes
Network diagram
Activity resource requirements
Resource calendars
Activity duration estimates
Resource breakdown structure
In addition, check your scope statement for any schedule constraints or project assumptions. Project staff assignments should be consulted for the actual staff assigned to schedule activities. Your risk register will have lots of information associated with risks to resources, duration estimates, staff availability, constraints, and so forth.
The EEF you are most likely to use is the organization’s scheduling tool (software). OPAs include schedules from previous similar projects and any scheduling methodology, templates, or procedures.