Scheduling?

One of the common misconceptions about project management
is that it is just scheduling. At last report, Microsoft had sold a
huge number of copies of Microsoft Project®, yet the project failure
rate remains high. Scheduling is certainly a major tool used to
manage projects, but it is not nearly as important as developing a
shared understanding of what the project is supposed to accomplish
or constructing a good work breakdown structure (WBS) to
identify all the work to be done (I discuss the WBS in Chapter 6).
In fact, without practicing good project management, the only
thing a detailed schedule is going to do is allow you to document
your failures with great precision!
I do want to make one point about scheduling software. It
doesn’t matter too much which package you select, as they all have
strong and weak points. However, the tendency is to give people
the software and expect them to learn how to use it without any
training. This simply does not work. The features of scheduling
software are such that most people don’t learn the subtleties by
themselves. They don’t have the time, because they are trying to
do their regular jobs, and not everyone is good at self-paced learning.
You wouldn’t hire a green person to run a complex machine
in a factory and put him to work without training, because you
know he will destroy something or injure himself. So why do it
with software?