- Once you got a well define project scope, you'll need to schedule in, when the what will be done, and by whom. To do this, there are five interrelated scheduling activities you can use to get your scheduling right. You start by identifying the activities to be done. To do this, you define the activities that need to be done to create each work package. You should look to leverage the relevant Subject Matter Expert or SME, or team member to help you with this. As you might not have those technical expertise yourself and that's okay. Next, it's time to create a network diagram. Using the work packages that have been defined, to create a network diagram that shows the sequence these will be created. This method represents the activities as boxes or nodes, with relationship shown as the logical dependencies between the boxes. And it might look something like this. In this example, the labeled boxes represent tasks, with the arrow showing logical dependencies. You can also add lag as a plus sign or lead as a minor sign tag to your arrows. The lag represents the defined delay between tasks, while the lead shows an overlap between two linked activities. Okay, so once you've got your net work diagram sorted, you can move on to estimating activity durations. You can use any of the estimation activities we discussed in our estimation video to do this. But essentially, you need to try and figure out exactly how long each activity should take to complete. With the activity durations estimated, it's time to create a schedule. You can do this in two different ways, either as a critical path or a critical chain. Critical path puts the emphasis on activities in a project and understanding the shortest time to complete all activities in a logical order. Critical chain on the other hand, puts the emphasis on resources, both labor and non-labor within the project. There's actually quite a lot to know when it comes to both the critical path and the critical chain. So make sure you go over the resources for both that we've provided. Finally, you need to present your findings. And one of the best ways to do this is in a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a kind of bar chart that shows a timeline for the project and all its activities. Some of the typical things included in a Gantt chart are the duration an activity should last for, the start and finish dates, logical connections, milestones and comparisons with the original plan, as the project evolves. You can generate a Gantt chart using software. So find out if your organization has access to something or find a resource you would like online. And that's it for this video. Scheduling is one of the key activities project managers are expected to do for most projects they work on. And this can be daunting, but following the five step process we've discussed in this video, you can go into the scheduling process with confidence.