A Schedule and a Process Walk into this Bar...

…and sit down together to watch the game. This hot little Methodology with a stunning set of Best Practices was tending to business behind the counter. The Schedule, a tough sort with milestones tattooed on its phases and sporting a worn leather MFON, orders a shot of tequila, while the Process asks for a red fruity drink with an umbrella. The Methodology leans over and says to the Process: Hey, normally I'm not too impressed by a macho WBS like your friend there; you seem to have a pretty nice workflow and are more my type — if you only had a pair of dates and some duration, maybe you could provide a scope of deliverables I'd be interested in! The Process turned the same shade as its drink and the Schedule started laughing so hard it burst its baseline. Needless to say, it was one of those rare Start-to-Finish relationships with very little lag.

Nothing like a little bawdy PMO humor to get things rolling.

But seriously, sometimes I have these deep introspective moments where I reflect on the nature of methodologies, processes and workflows, and how they relate to schedule activities and individual skills.

Actually I think about this a lot.

In fact, I even have a term for this — the Hierarchy of Guidance.

I have been compelled to codify this concept because from time to time I run into organizations where there is a lack of understanding about how they all relate to each other, which is a breeding ground for pandemic levels of confusion.

One of the places where this gets interesting (and useful) is at the intersection of schedule and process. If you take a specific process step and assign planned duration and dates to it, Viola! What you have is all the ingredients for a schedule entity. In other words, processes and schedules have much in common. Both a WBS and a workflow establish the tasks needed to achieve a certain result with a name and responsibility; either can establish critical sequence with predecessor/successor relationships, or alternatively run in parallel. It's simply a question of whether or not the tasks have planned durations and dates that ultimately define the form that the procedure is delivered through. It is this very similarity that also presents potential for pandemonium.

So, the sixty four thousand dollar question is where to draw the distinction between when guidance is provided by the schedule versus the workflow when they are used together. The answer might wobble a bit based on whether the culture leans towards being schedule-centric or is more comfortable with processes. I've worked with organizations that have historically relied entirely upon workflows and those that have done everything with a schedule. Either case is an extreme, so being presented with the flexibility to have both vehicles can be vexing at first.

For me, the real distinction is around their very differences — whether a significant amount of effort is involved and if the outcome is date-driven. If the answer to those two questions is yes, then I am inclined to suggest a schedule activity is usually more appropriate. Perhaps more important is making sure that the tasks in the WBS and those in associated processes do not overlap or contradict each other. This violates the first rule of project management, which is, Keep Your Story Straight. Make sure you construct processes and WBS templates that complement, rather than conflict with each other.

Bottom line, workflows are great for governance and compliance functions (like reviews and approvals), triggering notifications or to hand off documents. Save real work activities for the schedule, so you can resource load them and have those all important histograms.

So, as the sun slowly sinks towards the autumn horizon, take a moment to contemplate yet one more wild and crazy example of the dichotomy that sometimes arises with business management tools and techniques.