Establish and maintain the project’s budget and schedule.

The project’s budget and schedule are based on developed estimates and ensure that budget allocation, task complexity, and task dependencies are appropriately addressed.

The project’s budget and schedule (including the lifecycle-related activities of the acquirer) the supplier’s efforts and those of supporting organizations and other stakeholders (including any supplier that supports the acquirer) are established, tracked, and maintained for the duration of the project. In addition to creating a schedule for project work products, the acquirer should have the schedule independently reviewed by individuals external to the project to ensure that the project schedule can be validated.

Event-driven, resource-limited schedules have proven to be effective in dealing with project risk. Identifying accomplishments to be demonstrated before initiation of an event provides some flexibility in the timing of the event, a common understanding of what is expected, a better vision of the state of the project, and a more accurate status of the project’s tasks.

Typical Work Products

1.    Project schedules

2.    Schedule dependencies

3.    Project budget

Subpractices

1.    Identify major milestones.

Milestones are often imposed to ensure completion of certain deliverables by the milestone. Milestones can be event based or calendar based. If calendar based, once milestone dates have been agreed on, it is often difficult to change them.

2.    Identify schedule assumptions.

When schedules are initially developed, it is common to make assumptions about the duration of certain activities. These assumptions are frequently made on items for which little if any estimation data is available. Identifying these assumptions provides insight into the level of confidence (i.e., uncertainties) in the overall schedule.

3.    Identify constraints.

Factors that limit the flexibility of management options must be identified as early as possible. The examination of the attributes of work products and tasks often bring these issues to the surface. Such attributes can include task duration, resources, inputs, and outputs.

Since key characteristics of pre-qualified or other potential suppliers are elements of project success, the acquirer considers these characteristics (e.g., technical and financial capability, management and delivery processes, production capacity, and business type and size) in identifying constraints for the project.

4.    Identify task dependencies.

Typically, the tasks for a project can be accomplished in some ordered sequence that minimizes the duration of the project. This sequencing involves the identification of predecessor and successor tasks to determine optimal ordering.

5.    Define the budget and schedule.

6.    Establish corrective action criteria.

Criteria are established for determining what constitutes a significant deviation from the project plan. A basis for gauging issues and problems is necessary to determine when corrective action should be taken. Corrective actions may require replanning, which may include revising the original plan, establishing new agreements, or including mitigation activities in the current plan.

Criteria for corrective action are based on key objectives defined in the acquisition strategy using process, product, and service level measures. The measures represent key stakeholder needs and threshold values of acceptable limits that, in the stakeholder’s judgment, will provide the needed capability. All measures that represent key stakeholder needs and other measures for monitoring the supplier are defined in the Statement of Work (SOW), along with their associated minimum allowed performance levels. These measures are used to identify issues and problems and gauge whether corrective actions should be taken. The plan should define how these measures will be assessed and evaluated.