What is Scheduling Methodology? (PMI-SP)

Scheduling methodology is set of rules and methods used to develop schedule. Various scheduling methodologies that exists include:

• Critical Path Method (CPM): Schedule is created by looking at activity duration and activity relationship.
  
  
• Critical Chain Method: It is CPM, with effect of assigning resources to activities.
  
  
• Location-based scheduling (LBS): It develops a schedule that shows:
  
  
  • Location and time of the activity,
  • Movement of the crews through time and location.
  • LBS focuses on optimizing resource utilization and their production rates.
  • LBS is also known as vertical production method, linear scheduling, repetitive scheduling method, flow production and flow-line scheduling.
    
    
• On-Demand Scheduling:
  
  
  • Activities are defined with duration and dependencies. 
  • Each activity is pulled for execution when the resource is available. 
  • The purpose of on-demand scheduling is to limit a team's work-in-progress (WIP) in order to balance the demand against a team's delivery throughput. 
    It is usually used in adaptive life cycle.
    
    
• Lean Scheduling:
  
  
  • It is same as On-Demand Scheduling, with focus on minimizing waste (lags, delays, extra time) in order to maximize value. The project team collaborates in pull planning sessions and performs these steps:
    
    
    • Master scheduling:  Identifies key milestones, key activities, and phases. 
    • Phase scheduling. Identifies phases from master schedule:
      
      
      • Determines duration, sequences, constraints for each phase.
      • Phase schedule is used to generate look-ahead schedules (work to be done in next periods)
        
        
    • Look-ahead planning: By considering resource capacity, detailed plans for work to be done in next weeks are established.
      
      

• Intelligent Systems:

  In software, assumptions and activity requirements, such as constraints, hard logic (mandatory dependency), resources, and conditions (IF-THEN-ELSE) are entered.
  Schedule model learns from progress made and proposes a new sequence of relationships for remaining work. Another option is that the software learns from other projects’ schedule models and based on that, it reserves materials, equipment and workers.

• Line of balance:
  
  It focuses on production rates over time for repetitive activities. The main objective is to find the required resources for each activity. It calculates productivity along with time in an easy graphical representation.

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