Types of schedule

Planning covers cost, quality, scope, risk, and many more areas. A core concept that should be planned for is time, which we usually refer to as a schedule. Scheduling is assigning time or order to the elements.

There are two main forms of scheduling:

• Dependency-based
• Priority-based

In many projects, there are hard, unavoidable dependencies among elements; for example, you can’t paint a wall before building it, and you can’t build it before building the floor underneath it. Such projects are usually scheduled using a dependency-based method, where we create a network of those dependencies along with other determining factors and use that to calculate the orders and start dates. This calculation is done using either the critical path method (CPM) or a method similar to it.

Software applications such as Oracle’s Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project are examples of tools built around the CPM methods.

On the other hand, some projects can be broken down into building elements that are not too dependent on each other. In this case, you don’t need a dependency-based schedule, and a simpler priority-based method would suffice. In this method, you assign a priority to each element and then order them based on their priorities and importance, and then work through the list.

Adaptive projects require priority-based schedules, and if you believe that you can’t create a true priority-based schedule, it may be a sign that the product can’t be developed using an adaptive method. Predictive projects, on the other hand, can have either type of schedule.