It Is Not Just Scheduling!

One of the common misconceptions about project management is that it is just scheduling. At last report, Microsoft had sold a huge number of copies of Microsoft Project^®, yet the failures remain high. Scheduling is certainly a major tool used to manage projects, but it is not nearly as important as developing a shared understanding of what the project is supposed to accomplish or constructing a good work breakdown structure (WBS) to identify all the work to be done (I will discuss the WBS later). In fact, without practicing good project management, the only thing a detailed schedule is going to do is allow you to document your failures with great precision!

I do want to make one point about scheduling software. It doesn’t matter too much which package you select, as they all have strong and weak points. However, the tendency is to give people the software and expect them to learn how to use it without any training. This simply does not work. The features of scheduling software are such that most people don’t learn the subtleties by themselves. They don’t have the time, because they are trying to do their regular jobs, and not everyone is good at self-paced learning. You wouldn’t hire a green person to run a complex machine in a factory and put him to work without training, because you know he would destroy something or injure himself. So why do it with software?