Project schedules: your guide to delivering projects on time, all the time

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Key takeaways

• Project scheduling breaks down projects into three parts: what needs to be done, when it is due, and what resources are required to deliver the work
• You need a flexible schedule that lets you pivot projects when necessary while still delivering projects on time
• Always involve your team, so you can get accurate estimates and increase their confidence in the schedule

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As a Delivery Lead, there is one thing I know: <highlight>every project needs a schedule</highlight>.

Breaking projects down into tasks and deliverables and setting due dates not only helps keep them on track, but also prevents teams from being overworked and burning out. It allows you to define what needs to get done and when each part will be delivered.

We’ll break down a few project scheduling processes (with examples from expert planners) that you can use to build better project schedules ⏳

What is project scheduling?

Project scheduling is the process of identifying what needs to be done, when it needs to be delivered, and what resources need to be utilized. A schedule usually contains tasks (often with start and finish dates), deliverables, and project milestones.

Your project schedule should look something like this 👇

Alas, no matter how hard we try and how carefully we plan and prioritize projects, we all know that schedules can change for many different reasons: 

• A task might take longer than anticipated
• Another project in your pipeline might need immediate attention
• Team members are out sick or on holiday
• ...and sometimes, an entire project might even be deprioritized due to unforeseen events.

What team leaders can do is create a working, flexible schedule so that when these problems occur (and they will), it’s easier to pivot and still deliver projects on time.

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What’s the difference between project planning and project scheduling?

Project planning involves the process of outlining how a project will operate from start to finish. ‍

Project scheduling involves plotting those plans, costs, and deliverables onto an operational timeline.

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6 benefits of having a solid project schedule

Without a project schedule, the team and the client cannot know when work is happening, who is doing it, and what they should do. In short: chaos!

A project schedule means you can:

🧑‍💻 Allocate people to tasks (and remember: you’re allocating people, not resources)
🏋️ Ensure that people are not being over- or underbooked onto project work–especially important when multiple projects might be vying for their attention
🤔 Understand task dependencies and reduce blockers. You can spot errors in the sequencing of tasks so people aren’t wasting time waiting for another task to be completed.
‍🤝 Help the team self-organize. They can look at the schedule and see what they’re meant to be working on, which means you’re free to work on other tasks and not answer a hundred “what should I work on today?” questions.
‍⚠️ Flag milestones and key due dates with stakeholders and teams alike. You can spot them looming and plan accordingly.
‍👀 Track progress. If you’re expecting to hit certain due dates within a project, you can track the actual progress of work against the expected schedule. That doesn’t mean yelling at people if they’re behind, but it does mean you can get ahead and manage any problems.  

Remember: your scheduling skills bring structure to the project. Without them, people are unsure of what they’re meant to be doing and when they’re meant to have done it. By giving them structure, you’re freeing them up to do the things they’re specialists in. It’s a hugely important skill and a task that should not be underestimated.

How to create a project schedule in 3 steps

Scheduling a new project is an important task that can be expensive to get wrong.

You want to ensure you allocate enough time to deliver what has been sold, which is critical for safeguarding your organization’s financial well-being. At the same time, you also want to ensure that your clients receive what they paid for while taking care of your team’s well-being and morale. It’s all about finding the right balance. 

1. Talk to your stakeholders 📞

Before creating your work schedule, communicate with stakeholders like the project sponsor or sales team who have the most information at this stage. Ensure you gather essential information like:

• What are the project details? 
• Has there been any discussion about the project’s delivery, such as feedback loops, key delivery milestones, or specific security or tech stack considerations?
• Have due dates been discussed, and if yes, what is the driving factor behind them? This is important because it will impact how you schedule the work.
• How much time has been sold? What hours/days do you have to schedule? This part is also closely tied to the scope of the work. For example, it might take your team less time to build a simple website for a brand than to create a large ecommerce website. 
• Are those roles charged at different rates?

Once you have this information, you can start putting together a draft schedule. Work with your team to determine dependencies, gaps in knowledge, and other work that is happening.

2. Meet with your team 👥

Book a pre-kickoff meeting with your team to outline the deliverables and timeframes according to any known due dates and the project budget. For instance, if the project involves creating a campaign for a global event, it’s crucial to work backward from the event itself, keeping in mind that this is a hard due date that’s beyond the control of both you and your client.

Create a list of epics with the team and begin estimating against them. This will help you gauge how realistic the budget is and start defining parameters around the deliverables. It will also form the beginning of your project schedule.

Build in feedback loops. If one of the epics is designing a homepage, there’s a strong chance your client will want to review this design more than once. Other stakeholders will also want to give their feedback, so make sure you talk to the client about how quickly they can give or get feedback. For example, maybe their CEO needs four weeks’ notice before reviewing designs. Build this into your timeline!

3: Get the client’s feedback on the schedule

Review this schedule with your client and get their input. 

Does this schedule look realistic to them with the suggested feedback slots? Will they be able to get assets over to you in time for designs to get started? Are they planning any annual leave you need to be aware of? 

Building a project schedule that works for your team and your client is important.

3 project scheduling processes to create smarter plans

To deliver a project successfully, you need a flexible project schedule that can absorb speed bumps as you work through it. If you can manage changes as a project progresses, you can reassign tasks and use your team’s capacity to ensure it is still delivered on time.

Here are three processes you can start using today to build smarter project schedules.

1. Work breakdown schedule

A work breakdown schedule (WBS) is a simple way to organize projects because it works towards an outcome-based plan.

Instead of having a detailed, daily schedule for your team, a work breakdown schedule focuses on key deliverables by focusing on the ‘what’ of the project. Because this process focuses on end deliverables over day-to-day planning, you can distill an entire project into one chart that shows a breakdown of broad tasks.

This process is an excellent way to break down a project into broad deliverables and assign a rough budget. Still, it doesn’t assign dates to each deliverable or account for resources (you need to create a resource breakdown structure for that). This process is good for mapping out your entire project without getting bogged down in every last detail (that’s what #3 on the list is for 😉).

➡️ Download our free work breakdown structure templates

2. Milestone schedule

A milestone schedule is a more detailed version of a work breakdown schedule, as it marks when important parts of projects are completed.

For example, we could map out deliverables like finishing a site’s design using a milestone schedule. Once that’s finished, the team could move on to the next milestone—development. Milestone schedules are helpful because they allow team leaders to visualize important goals and predict when a project will be completed.

3. Detailed schedule

Using a detailed schedule requires team leaders to break down projects based on which tasks need to be completed, when they need to be completed, and who needs to work on them.

This project scheduling process stands out because it helps manage creative teams who are working on complex tasks or juggling several projects at once. If your team members continually jump from project to project, this process gives you an easy way to build a detailed schedule right down to the daily and hourly tasks.

It’s how BuzzFeed keeps its team on track while juggling 100-200 video projects at any given time. Not only does each video project in their pipeline take 2-3 weeks to complete, but the team is also constantly inundated with new projects. So, they need use the schedule in Float to reassign tasks to whoever is most available and best suited for them without throwing their entire workflow off.

BuzzFeed’s Senior Director of production operations, Leah Zeis, is in charge of breaking down video projects into deliverables and creating a schedule. She says before a project starts, the creative team fills out a project form that maps out the project team, the deliverables, and the overall project timeline. Then, the project’s timeline is assessed, and tasks are allocated to the available people in Float.

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Leah Zeis

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Senior Director, Production Operations at BuzzFeed

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It’s in Float that we start creating and assigning the editing tasks and resources to get the project delivered. We add information like the project due date and budget so that, at a high level, we can see what our resource capacity and availability are to schedule the right team for the job. When you’re managing 100 to 200 projects at once, we need to be able to see everyone’s schedules at a high level.

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With their detailed schedule, BuzzFeed’s team leaders know who has a free afternoon to take on a last-minute task. If a project falls behind or a team member gets sick they ensure that their deliverables remain on track.

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Make the most of your team’s time with project scheduling software

Rated #1 on G2, Float gives you the most accurate view of your team’s capacity to plan projects and schedule resources with confidence.

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5 best practices for maintaining an up-to-date project schedule

Here are some tips to help you build and maintain project schedules.

1. Keep track of all your projects in one place

You and your team are probably working on several projects simultaneously. Every additional project impacts ongoing work, and it's hard to keep track of this if your projects are all managed from disparate locations.

The best way to ensure you are aware of all the work going on and when it is supposed to happen is to centralize project schedules, preferably in a resource management tool. 

‍Resource management software like Float shows project schedules and resource capacity so you can understand how incoming work affects ongoing work, how much time your people have to work on the projects, and where you need help or need to make changes to plans. 

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Maike Jahnens

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Head of Financial Operations and Capacity Management at Scholz & Friends 

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Once a week, we have a virtual capacity planning meeting with account managers and creative directors, in which we go through projects in Float to see team workloads and availability. Float enables us to answer important questions like: Is this project properly planned? How much time can we allocate to tentative projects without blocking confirmed projects? Can we predict how much work is coming in?

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2. Involve your team in planning

As a resource or project manager, you’re likely the one who breaks down the project deliverables and creates a schedule for your team, letting them know when they’re allocated to the project and for how long.

There are lots of small pieces that fit together to form the larger picture of the project schedule. It’s important to work in the open and get input from your team as you build the work schedule. This will help increase your people’s confidence in the estimates. 

Pro tip: if you use a centralized tool, your project schedule is accessible to everyone in your team, making it easier for them to flag issues with allocations or provide feedback.

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Clara Tooth

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Former Manager at Accounts and Legal

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Because Float is accessible, team members can see and adjust their schedules. This flexibility comes in handy frequently, as team members often have to lend a hand to others on a project that is not scheduled in Float.

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3. Use historical data to improve estimates

In addition to input from your team, data from past projects can also help you create better estimates. For example, by looking at the number of hours scheduled for a project and comparing it to the actual amount of time spent on it, you can see if your estimates are correct or if you need to increase or reduce the timelines for similar projects in the future. 

4. Prepare for the unexpected

Not everything will go exactly as planned, so it’s important to anticipate and prepare for surprises! While you can’t predict every possible scenario, allocate time in the schedule for contingencies like a team member being unexpectedly absent. 

You can use percentage or time-based buffers to allow enough time to come up with a solution. 

5. Have a flexible project schedule

Your project schedule needs to be flexible. Things get delayed. People get sick. Priorities change. Your schedule will need to be able to handle change! 

Using resource management software like Float to manage changes is much easier than tracking it on a spreadsheet—you can drag and drop blocks of time or multiple tasks easily. 

An added benefit is that there is one single source of truth, so if you need to fast-track, crash schedules, or use other resource leveling techniques, the changes will be automatically updated for everyone who has access to the schedule.

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Charles Hartley

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CEO and Founder of Show + Tell

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We needed one solution that offered flexible resource scheduling, a simple process for employees to track their time, and powerful reporting on our project data. For us, Float ticks all the boxes.

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Pro tip: build better plans with project scheduling software

Project scheduling software (like Float!) helps team leaders track and manage their team’s time, automatically storing data for every project so that it’s easy to monitor utilization and measure how efficient your team is. That’s what helps you build better, smarter project schedules.

Once you know how long it takes your team to do the work, you can plot deliverables better and, ultimately, complete tasks faster.  

Teams using the right tool can plan multiple projects at once and get an accurate picture of their overall capacity. Not only does this protect your team from burning out, but it also means that you’ll know if your team has the time to take on new projects, or if you need to hire outside help.

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[fs-toc-omit] Scheduling is easier and more flexible with Float

You should know by now that project scheduling isn’t rocket science. In fact, with the right tools and planning, it’s a quick and easy way to ensure that every project in your pipeline stays on track—and your team stays sane 😎‍‍

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More than 4,500 teams rely on Float to plan and schedule their projects. Try it free for 14 days, no credit card required.

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