ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the principal planning and scheduling methods available to project managers and those working in project management office. It also describes planning and scheduling with network diagrams. Project managers will in time come to learn which estimators tend towards optimism, pessimism or accuracy. Experienced project managers will even learn to make allowances for people and ‘adjust’ their estimates accordingly. One very elementary method for listing tasks that should be performed is seen in the action plans that are often included when the minutes of meetings are distributed. Those ‘plans’ simply list all the actions agreed during the meeting and name the person or people responsible for taking each action, along with the required completion date. Henry Gantt, one of several early industrial management researchers working in the US, developed the use of tables and charts for scheduling and progressing manufacturing and assembly work in factories around the year 1900.
