(2.0.P1)

The project schedule and budget is created along with the appropriate Project Charter deliverable from Step 1.0. The schedule is a vital tool to ensure that the project team knows what they need to do. Many people are uncomfortable creating a schedule. Usually this is because the project has not been well defined. It is very difficult to create a valid schedule if the project manager is not really sure of what the project will deliver. 

The budget represents the amount of money available to spend on the project. Depending on your organization and how you do your accounting, the budget could contain only the external costs of the project (contractors, hardware, software, material, etc.). Some organizations also include the costs of internal labor in the budget. These organizations typically have some type of chargeback process to allocate the internal costs back to the client or client department.

(The TenStep process does not include the financial work that would be required to justify the project to begin with. This financial work could include determining a simple cost/benefit or more sophisticated Return on Investment (ROI), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), etc. This process for determining the financial justification for a project is covered in the PortfolioStep Portfolio Management Framework (www.PortfolioStep.com). In the TenStep process, it is assumed that the high-level financial analysis and project justification are already completed and that the project has been initially approved.)   

The Define the Work step ensures you have an agreement with the project sponsor on the work that should be completed. In this step the project manager determines how the work will be completed. Depending on the size of the project, it is possible to use a project management package like MS Project, a spreadsheet or you could even just keep track of the activities in your head.

There are a number of techniques for building a schedule. Perhaps the best option is to utilize a prior schedule from a previous, similar project as your starting point. However, because of the unique nature of projects, that may prove difficult.

A good second choice is to look for a pre-existing schedule template from a project with similar characteristics. For instance, you may be installing a package. Although this is the first time that this particular package has been implemented in your company, you may be able to find a generic template for a package implementation project.

If you do not have a prior historical schedule or a schedule template to use as your starting point, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) technique can be used as a starting point. The WBS is a technique for looking at the project at a high level and subsequently breaking the work into smaller and smaller pieces until you can get the full picture of the work that needs to be performed. The entire team can collaborate on this exercise. For the most part, the Work Breakdown Structure technique can always be used as the starting point for creating a schedule from scratch. If you (and others) do not know enough to create a WBS for the project (or at least for the first three months of the project), you probably are not in a position to start the project. In that case, you may want to only define a project for the analysis portion of the project. When the analysis portion is complete, you should have enough information to define the rest of the project. 

The Relationship Between Defining and Planning the Work (2.0.P2)

You will note that defining the work is step 1 of the TenStep process and that building the schedule and budget is step 2. However, this numbering does not imply that these are necessarily sequential. You will usually find that you cannot complete the Project Charter without starting to lay out the overall project schedule. In many cases, these two deliverables need to be worked on in parallel. As you gather information around scope and deliverables, you will need to start laying out an overall timeline so that you can get your hands around estimated effort and duration. As you get more “definition” information, you will fill in more detail on the schedule. When the deliverables, scope, assumptions and approach are complete, you should have enough information in the schedule to estimate the necessary budget, effort and duration - which in turn are used to complete the Project Charter.