Robin said:
Hi
Our organisation works on Projects that may last up to 5 years. For this
reason we plan initially at Macro level to get an approximate plan in place
for the entire project. We then plan on a micro level from a month to month
basis. Can anyone suggest a practical way of dealing with this scenario
within Project?
Thanks in advance
Sounds like a good application of Rolling Wave scheduling. I've never
seen it done month by month, but I can't think of any reason why it
wouldn't work. It's used a lot in R&D projects, where you can't
identify detailed task lists for future efforts because the present and
near-future tasks will determine what is going to be done in the long
term.
You do your detailed schedule for the near term. You estimate how long
it will take to do the next phase, and put a single task, usually
called someting like "Phase 2", to follow the current group of tasks.
Following that is another single task, "Phase 3". And so forth. As you
get near the end of the current phase, you can schedule the next phase
in detail, because you have made the necessary decisions to know what
those tasks will be.
It's important to link the tasks within each phase with the tasks in
the next phase, and to remove the dependencies between the Phase level
tasks as the details are filled in beneath them, so as to maintain a
meaningful critical path.
I hope this brief explanation is sufficient. There is a little more
information on Rolling Wave scheduling in the PMIBOK.
Hope this helps in your world.
