You’ve heard the saying, “Why re-invent the wheel?” Yet so many of us want to start from scratch when creating project schedules for each new project. Why, I don’t know. It’s just our inclination – or maybe it was just mine – to make life harder than it needs to be. I think that possibly it’s because no project is perfect and we often want to start completely fresh in order to try to rid ourselves of whatever problems, issues, or bumps we encountered on past projects. I do reuse schedules now, but it took me a few years to feel comfortable with it – I didn’t come by it naturally.
In my mind – and from what I’ve been writing in the past in terms of best practices – good project management involves establishing a workable, understandable and easy to follow methodology. And, in my opinion, that involves establishing reusable processes and templates. That means reusable project planning documents, signoff/approval sheets, testing documents and many others – and…yes…project schedules. In fact, I even had a specific consulting gig where I helped a client identify common tasks in their projects and built reusable project schedule templates for them that would work for about 90% of their projects. All the PMs had to do going forward was plug some of the specialty tasks into the template and go.
In my mind – and from what I’ve been writing in the past in terms of best practices – good project management involves establishing a workable, understandable and easy to follow methodology. And, in my opinion, that involves establishing reusable processes and templates. That means reusable project planning documents, signoff/approval sheets, testing documents and many others – and…yes…project schedules. In fact, I even had a specific consulting gig where I helped a client identify common tasks in their projects and built reusable project schedule templates for them that would work for about 90% of their projects. All the PMs had to do going forward was plug some of the specialty tasks into the template and go.
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