Using the information collected, the Project Manager tracks the actual work done against the tasks and updates the Activities Schedule accordingly. It is recommended that the Activities Schedule is updated on a regular basis (i.e. once a week or once every two weeks or at maximum once a month), since frequent updates to the schedule not only save time in the long run, but they also allow the Project Manager to quickly identify potential problem areas. Small shifts on individual tasks that may seem unimportant, they might cause significant variances to other dependent tasks if corrective actions are not undertaken promptly.
The date on which the Activities Schedule is updated to reflect the actual progress until that moment, is called Status Date. The status date depends usually on the date that the Progress Report is submitted, since it is used to reflect the progress of the project according to most recent (updated) information.
In order to update the Activities Schedule there are several steps that you should follow:
| 1. | Update actual start and finish dates to see whether a task or activity has started or finished later or earlier than planned, as well as the impact that this shift may have on resources and the overall project schedule. In case that a task is interrupted you should indicate when work will continue on the remaining portion of the task. |
| 2. | Update the actual duration to indicate how long it actually took or it will actually take to complete a task or activity. This update may be done automatically provided that you have updated the actual start and finish dates. |
| 3. | Indicate which tasks have not started yet, which are in progress and which are 100% complete. |
| 4. | For those tasks that are in progress, update the percentage of completion to indicate how much progress, in terms of duration, has been made up to status date. Be aware, however, that the percentage of completion, the actual duration and the remaining duration are interdependent quantities. This means that if you update one of them, the values of the other two will change. |
| 5. | Update actual work (only if resources have been assigned to tasks) to indicate how much work has actually been accomplished on a task up to status date. |
When updating the Activities Schedule is very important to create a new copy of the schedule and maintain an archive of each version. In this way, you will never lose the history of the project and you will also have a copy of every schedule for audit purposes.
After updating the schedule, do not forget to notify the appropriate stakeholders for any modification to the schedule information that was judged as necessary. Besides, be aware that schedule updates may require adjustments to other aspects of the project plan, such as resource and cost schedules.
Schedule updates may result to revisions of the approved (baseline) project schedule. This applies in case that the updating of specific tasks (i.e. critical tasks) causes changes to start or finish dates of the project. These changes may come up as a result of the change management process. If you find that actual project progress is so different from the baseline estimates and thus any comparison between the two is meaningless, rebaselining (i.e. save a new baseline for the Activities Schedule) may be needed to provide realistic data to performance measurement. However, care must be taken before rebaselining, because historical data will be lost. It is recommended that rebaselining should only be used as a last resort in controlling the schedule. Instead new target schedules should be the normal outcome of schedule revision.