After Scope Management, the PMP (Project Management Professional) Time Management Knowledge Area revolves around measuring and preparing for the durations a project will take. It is the 3rd project management knowledge area and incredibly important to know when managing a project. You’ll find that PMP Time Management is a key knowledge area as you work on your PMP study plan and through a PMP Course. The PMP is primarily concerned with the relationships between activities, their start and finish dates, project schedule, and guaranteeing the finalization of each and every project activity, according to project management professional training.
Are you familiar with the methods and material of the PMP Time Management Knowledge area? Feeling ready to master the PMP Time Management portion of the exam? Keep reading to learn what you need to know about the PMP Time Management Knowledge Area processes.
Let us now go over the processes that are involved in this knowledge area and how they can be used by project managers to ensure time management is controlled and a project runs smoothly.
PMP Time Management Process 1: Plan Schedule Management Process
The process for Plan Schedule Management is used to organize all of a project’s time planning tasks, which is very important to keep an organized and orderly project within scope. The Plan Schedule Management Process includes defining activity interrelationships, schedule compression strategies, and time planning approaches, among other things. The Schedule Management Plan explains how to determine activity start and finish dates, estimate overall project deadlines, and design and maintain the project’s schedule.
It should be noted that project management procedures are recorded and regulated using project management templates. It’s always a good idea to look at examples of free project management templates to get a sense of how they function, but taking an online PMP Course will help you understand the deep knowledge you need behind them.
PMP Time Management Process 2: Define Activities
The Define Activities Process is the second procedure listed in this area. To finish the project schedule, first, define what has to be accomplished during the project. These are referred to as activities. The Define Activities method will assist in determining the activities that must be completed in order to finish the project. Knowing the activities that must be undertaken and the time they will consume is pivotal to proper project planning.
PMP Time Management Process 3: Sequence Activities
During this process, the activities of a project are looked at to see how they relate to each other and if there needs to be a sequence defined. With the Sequence Activities process, the interdependence of activities is specified. There will be many activities for a project, but some will be dependent on others, some will need to end together, some will need to begin together, some will require certain other activities to have first been completed and so on and so forth.
Also, take into consideration that there are certain key phrases associated with the third procedure of PMP Time Management that you should become familiar with, such as:
- Precedence diagramming method. This is a critical approach for fulfilling the project’s overall timetable. It’s also a vital part of the procedure.
- Leads and lags. The length of time you must wait between actions is described by leads and lags.
- Network Diagram. This term indicates the general activity relationship and the pathways from the beginning to the finish of the project. As a result, in order to fulfill the project schedule, the Network Diagram is a vital component in project planning and allows for a great visual aid when project planning.
PMP Time Management Process 4: Estimate Activity Resources
Activity resource estimations are planned during the Estimate Activity Resources procedure. For example, it is decided who will conduct an individual activity, if it will be outsourced, or whether it will be performed by a group or resources. Knowing and describing who / what these resources are is another critical component of project management planning.
PMP Time Management Process 5: Estimate Activity Durations
After then, the process of estimating activity durations begins. Activity resources offer their effort estimates for the activities they are allocated to throughout this procedure. This is necessary in order to estimate the length of each activity from the bottom and up to the finish of the project schedule. During estimation, a variety of tools and approaches are employed to estimate and project these durations, which while are not 100% accurate, care should be taken to make them as accurate as possible with the tools at hand.
PMP Time Management Process 6: Develop Schedule
The Develop Schedule process gathers information received from previous stages and completes the entire project schedule. This will cover the start and finish dates of each particular project activity.
The timetable can be determined in a variety of ways. Remember that the Critical Path Method is by far the most widely utilized method for calculating project schedules. Projects may confront challenges, and certain activities could become delayed and result in them taking longer than anticipated to complete. Even if everything goes according to plan, the management or the client may want a tighter timeline or have additional requests. In that instance, the remaining operations must be finished faster than expected, which can be accomplished via Schedule Compression techniques.
When scenario analysis is used to predict future project outcomes using simulations, these are usually carried out with the assistance of computer programs, as manually creating these on a large scale is nearly impossible.
Critical Chain is a method for determining the total project timeline, similar to the critical path approach. Resource leveling is used to optimize resource utilization in a project and to guarantee that project team members have a fair task and will not be overburdened, leading to a delayed project.
The start and finish dates of each project activity, as well as the overall project deadline, are displayed in the Project Schedule. And a schedule baseline displays a project’s project schedule snapshot so that real results may be compared in the future for proper analysis.
PMP Time Management Process 7: Control Schedule
The Control Schedule process is the final process in the PMP Time Management knowledge area. To keep the project on track, the control Schedule process compares the project schedule to baselines and conducts corrective and preventative measures.
The third knowledge area of Project Management, PMP Time Management, comprises processes that must be managed to ensure that the project is completed on time. To learn more about this, and other areas of PMP, we recommend a self-paced online learning course that supports project managers who are looking to take the next step in their project management career.