Is Project Management all about scheduling?

The short answer to "Is Project Management all about scheduling" should be "No".

However, that has a caveat. based on my experience, if a Project Manager insists on keeping the schedule up-to-date, then scheduling will become his full-time job.

As we already mentioned, schedules are always out-of-sync with reality; while you are updating them the reality is changing. As a result, you will spend 100% of your time updating and collecting updates.

In a future post we will discuss EVS (Earned Value System). The most important lesson I learned from using EVS was this. It's irrelevant whether the task is 41% complete or 78% complete. It's either 0% (not started), 20% (started), 80% (ready for testing) or 100% complete, having been blessed by QA.

This saves a lot of useless schedule updates, which are meaningless since nobody really knows how long the task will take, and often the last 20% of the task takes 80% of the time. More about that in a future post.

So, "Is Project Management all about scheduling?"

No! A Project Manager needs to keep track of lots of minor details that people mention by the way.

A Project Manager needs to keep the team focus, and remove distractions, finding other resources (including himself, if needed) to do these.

A Project Manager is responsible for the meticulous coordination of projects from inception through to the finishing touches.

As my sig file at work used to say:

- Danny. Doing. Making it happen, with a smile.