Best Practices for Schedule Planning

Following are few best practices to be followed while developing schedule in MS Project

• Define holidays
• Define resource vacations
• Define resource availability (with start/finish end dates, work load (whether resource is available 50%/100%) for the project
• Avoid over/under allocation of resources
• Define Milestone tasks
• Make use of deadline date option for tasks instead of ‘Finish no later than’ or ‘Must Finish on’ constraints
• *Do not* assign resources at Summary task level
• *Do* Assign resources only at task level
• You should only link *like tasks* - for example, subtasks to subtasks and summary tasks to summary tasks.
• planned work / effort for a task should not be more than 40 hours (for effective tracking)
  planned duration for a task should not be more than 5 days
• Ensure all tasks have successor or predecessor values
• Establish parallelism/overlapping between tasks using (FS – x) / SS / FF days tasks (eg., FS-3 days/SS/SS+2/FF-2 days etc)
• Avoid assigning flexible / semi-flexible constraints / hard coded dates to tasks
• Avoid assigning multiple resources to tasks for effective identification of responsible/accountable task owner
• Use recurring task feature for meeting tasks
• Consider review/rework effort
• Configuring ‘Project Start Date’, which avoids introducing ‘Start No Earlier Than’ constraint for most of the tasks (Most of entry level PMs does this mistake with lack of knowledge)