The more clarity and detail you have in your schedule, the more likely you are to run a profitable, low-stress project that is completed on-time - and the earlier in the process you will know if the project is trending off-course. Maintaining this schedule of tasks throughout the project allows you to adjust your deadlines in advance, given unpredictable events (a client misses a deadline a blizzard knocks out internet for all your developers for two days, etc.), enabling you to control expectations in advance, and increase charges when appropriate. Once your schedule is complete, you should know, with as much specificity as possible, which tasks are required from which resources on which days, for the duration of a project.īy outlining these tasks, you can determine realistic deadlines, evaluate the relative priority of individual tasks and features, and define dependencies (what other tasks must be completed before starting a given task). Just as a project specification provides significant detail on the functional performance requirements of our project (the individual features required in the application), a schedule provides that same type of detail on how the project is executed - the individual tasks that are required to build the application. The process of scheduling is fundamental because it helps us answer several very important questions, as we’ll shortly address. In real-world project development - even when you’re a freelancer working alone - schedules aren’t just used to determine what you’ll work on today. We have things to do, and only a limited number of hours in a day, so let’s plot those things (or “tasks”) on a calendar, and - voila! - we have our schedule!īut in the context of our discussion, that just scrapes the surface. On one level, of course, scheduling is a simple concept. Schedules bring order to the planning and execution of any project, and provide you with information that allows you to increase your control over whether a project is profitable or not. Schedules map tasks (things to do) and resources (people to do those things) against time on a calendar. Scheduling is the process of creating and maintaining schedules. Previously in this article series, we discussed budgeting and pricing in this third article we carry on the discussion about making money as a freelancer, covering the role and importance of schedules in profitability. Previous article: The freelancing business part 2: budgeting your projects Introduction
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