ABSTRACT
Over the past couple of decades project management (PM) has become recognized as a major area of increasing importance within the management discipline. The application domains of management could be classified into strategic management, project management and operations management. Project management is the implementation arm of strategic management, used for implementing any change, whether hard or soft, whereas the operations management is about managing day to day operations of the organization. Management is about control, making sure that the system is operating well and moving in the right direction. But as Peter Druker said, we cannot manage it if we cannot measure it. Project planning and scheduling provides us with the set of tools and techniques and a system to develop the needed yardstick to measure and assess the health of our project. Not too long ago network analysis was the only technique widely known to the PM community but even that was little used. However during the last 20 years project management has matured and developed into a comprehensive set of tools and techniques, methods, strategies and systems that when effectively and efficiently applied contributes drastically to successful delivery of project objectives and goals. Project planning and scheduling is the heart of PM as most of the tools and techniques are introduced and applied within this particular knowledge area.
