Project Scheduling Tips:

Once you’ve done your estimates and understand what tasks are required, you need to prepare your project schedule.
A plan can only show the ultimate feasibility of achieving its objectives when the activities are put together in a schedule that defines when each activity will be carried out.
Step 1: Define activity sequence
This is the part where you work out the optimal sequence for all your tasks. You should know the dependencies, so slotting them together is easy.
Step 2: Assess resource availability
Once you put people into the equation and start juggling resource planning it isn’t so easy. Work out who you have available to spend time on your project, including their skills and abilities so you can best match them to the tasks.

Step 3: Assign resources
In this step you assign names to tasks. This will show you who is working all hours and who barely has anything to do at all during the schedule. It is recommended allocating resources to those tasks with zero slack first – these are the tasks that are on the critical path and it’s best to make sure they can be done first. Otherwise you’ll run the risk of not having people for those tasks and shifting the end date.

Step 4: Level resource usage
This is the point where you work out how many hours someone is realistically available to work on a task and you smooth out the resource forecasting. You can reassign tasks, or change the duration or start dates to make them fit with the people you have available and the amount of hours they can work on your project.
Step 5: Agree control points
It’s not just about your deliverables. Put in some activities around managing stage boundaries and allow time for approvals.
Step 6: Define milestones
Put some milestones in that schedule. It is advisable having enough milestones at major intervals “to gauge whether or not the plan is proceeding as expected.”
Step 7: Calculate totals
Work out your total resource requirements, and the cost of that resource. This inputs into the project budget, and you can use risk and change budgets accordingly to help with any unseen requirements later.
Step 8: Present the schedule
Now you have all the data, you need to present it in a way that can be easily understood. It is advisable to be presented in a graphical form, for example a Gantt chart or a critical path diagram. It even suggests you can do it on a spreadsheet with tasks down the page and the time period across the top.