Project work plan vs. schedule

Sometimes people who are new to project management don't understand the difference between project work plan and schedule. Actually, these things are two very different conceptions, but both of them are extremely important. In this article we will generally compare plan with schedule to define difference between them and to explain meaning of each term.

Besides this, we will consider special software to manage and share project work plan samples along with schedule of project work activities.

• Project work plan

What is project work plan? It – is a fundamental framework for performing a project. Creating project workplan includes outlining key project objectives, identifying activities and tasks, identifying needed resources, creating project charter, identifying project team structure, drafting template, and other essential points. Normally, it includes all things and arrangements that should be done in order to initiate, deploy, manage, execute and control the project. You can find lots of project examples on the Web, including special software designed for management of plan samples.

• Project work schedule

Creating the project work schedule is very important, but it is just a part of the main planning. It is time-specified project workplan that determines start dates, milestones and due dates of project tasks, activities and objectives. Project work schedule is what follows and specifies the main project work plan, describing duration, table of events, project working days etc. The schedule cannot exist without project work plan. There are different software solutions that allow managing schedules in different formats. Let's consider one good example of such software in the following paragraph.

VIP Task Manager is powerful software that will help you to understand the difference – with a help of this tool you can design project work plan, plan your tasks, organize your activities as well as to compose schedule. This software allows managing data through several convenient plan formats – Task List, Task Tree, and Calendar. This client-server software allows creating and organizing a project work plan template for recurring and similar projects along with composing and team sharing table of tasks. After you download and install this easy-to-use software, you can evaluate it during 30 days by playing with existing work examples (sample databases) or by creating your new database with unique templates.

Read also a new article about process management - PM client-server software for Windows