Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we'll move on to lightly review the schedule maintenance exam domain. This domain encompasses 23 percent of the exam and is often where people will hit a roadblock in project scheduling, both on the exam and in practice. There are seven objectives I'd like to highlight: establish communication requirements, collect the status of activities, incorporate and document schedule changes, maintain resource pool up to date, update project schedule based on cost, update the schedule activities regularly and update the risk register. Let's go through them in a similar way that we covered the previous domains. Our first domain touches on communications. I had already mentioned that the majority of objectives and activities relating to scheduling and project management overall requires some form of communication, even if it's simply distributing updates, reports or assignments. Understanding how to build a solid communications plan is important for the scheduler including what information needs to be sent out, to who, how often and so forth. Many of the exam objectives are fairly clear and our next one is no exception; collect the status of activities. Here we're literally collecting information from team members through follow-up. This can be through meetings, inspections or through other mediums that have been planned. When we talk about the next objective, incorporating and documenting schedule changes, we are referring only to those changes that have been approved. When schedule variance is discovered, something needs to be done to rectify existing issues or perhaps preventing them before they occur. In other cases this will require a re-baselining of the schedule, which also needs to be approved. The exam objective in question here refers to integrating those changes. In addition to all this, the changes should be documented carefully, including the justification and the cause for the changes. Next, we have maintaining an up-to-date resource pool. This is a no-brainer. A scheduler should be on top of any changes to the resources and keeping the resource calendars updated, else there will be issues that will result in delays. Our next three exam objectives pertain to schedule maintenance involving other updates. First, the project schedule should be kept updated in consideration of costs. You can see how a scheduler must understand and be on top of cost management as well. Without this you cannot know what options exist in managing the schedule, such as crashing or fast-tracking. We'll go through cost management as part of this course series. This next objective is fairly intuitive. It's necessary to keep all of the schedule activities updated. You may wonder why we'll point out something so obvious but in practice this is often an issue. Aside from the obvious here, you will need to keep the actual start and finish dates updated, the progress of activities, calculate earned value and any other relevant information to keep an accurate schedule available. And following this objective, we have a tie-in to risk. This involves updating the risk register, which is a document that contains all the information collected and analyzed of known risk. The risk register is a component of the project management plan. The schedule should incorporate risk as needed in order to be realistic. That was our final exam objective under schedule maintenance, bringing this movie to a close.