Project Schedule

What do we use the project schedule app for?

(This article is NOT to explain what the project schedule is - this article describes how we choose the appropriate apps to manage our projects).

Suppose you are managing a team project (we can treat a personal project as a team project with only one resource).

When team members are in the office at the beginning of each workday, they have a plan that tells them what they need to do today. For example, John knows that his work today is “Task 1.” task 1

Furthermore, if John cannot complete “Task 1” according to the plan, Joyce will not be able to complete “Task 3” tomorrow to follow the plan. task 2

If John cannot meet the schedule for completing “Task 1” by today, the project manager should reschedule (and get the team to do so). After rescheduling, when the team members are in the office tomorrow, the team will have an updated reasonable schedule to follow. (We don’t mean the team has to reschedule every day, that depends on the process your organization uses. And this is also another example of why we don’t recommend scheduling tasks in a short duration. Essentially, QuickPlan does not support hourly durations).

The previous example shows that a project plan is a guide for your team to execute the project. Executing work means effort and cost, and accuracy should be well balanced. manage more ...

So you plan the project by defining the tasks:

What is to be done?
When to start and when to finish?
Who is going to do it?
Where and why? Although not documented in the project plan, we know.
How are the relationships with other tasks defined?
How much about the work, the cost?

Also, lead the team so that the schedule always becomes a reality:

Execute the tasks.
Track the progress of the tasks.
Reschedule.
Communicate with stakeholders.

A roadmap is NOT a project schedule.

Let’s think of a roadmap as follows: roadmap

Do NOT use the Project Plan app to manage the product/business roadmap and high-level project plan. You can use the Roadmap app (or MS PowerPoint or a drawing app) to create the roadmap plan.

Question:

If I have a project that spans over a year, can I use QuickPlan for project planning?

Response:

Although sometimes, when we talk about a project plan, we mean a project schedule. However, “project plan” is a larger term that encompasses various activities in managing a project. And a plan can mean much more than a project. QuickPlan focuses primarily on project planning.
For your business and project, you may need multiple plans to manage the work and tasks, such as the roadmap plan, high-level project plan, and project schedule.
You can divide the project into sub-projects or phases, create the roadmap plan and high-level project plan first if needed.

Question:

My boss disagrees with the division of the project into subprojects.

Response:

To your boss, it’s one project.
To you, all the work is in one project when you report to the boss and in multiple projects when you implement it.

Question:

I need a tool to manage all kinds of tasks, to manage my projects.

Response:

We don’t know if there is an app that meets all your needs.

Do NOT use the project plan app to manage to-do tasks.

For example, a typical to-do task: John, please send the financial report to the client by the end of this week.

You don’t care when John starts the work; you care when John can complete the task.
You don’t care about the details of progress; you care about the task’s status (completed or open).
You don’t need to track the work because the effort required to complete it is small.

The calendar is NOT a different kind of project plan.

Although a “calendar” task may contain more features than a “TODO” task, a calendar is usually not the same as a project plan. You may find that they maintain different task properties. And calendar tasks lack many essential properties that are used in the project plan. For example, there are no parent-child relationships between calendar tasks. QuickPlan does not support synchronization with the Calendar app.

QuickPlan does not support synchronization with the Calendar app.

There is data loss because the information in the calendar and project plan tasks are not identical.
QuickPlan runs in the sandbox environment, which does not have the permission to track the change of the Calendar app automatically.