It's been observed that most of the times the projects fail not because of a lack of sophisticated tools, but because of lack of time and schedule management. The life cycle of a typical project goes through innumerable loops and jumps and unless proper scheduling and time analysis take place you'll be constantly running out of time and over-stretching your resources, frustrating your team members on one hand, and antagonizing your clients on the other.

Projma's time and schedule management module greatly simplifies the task of creating and managing the project schedule by handling the iterations in the schedule logic for you. It links your projects to your resources and creates scientific estimates and projections to help you draw a plan of action with solid figures and charts in front of you. Our time and scheduling module lets you divide your scheduling among the following broad categories:

	Critical Scheduling
	Important Scheduling
	Definite Scheduling
	Informal Scheduling

Critical scheduling naturally involves projects of complex nature and entails the handling of intricate project tasks and procedures. These projects are usually large in scale and require human and capital resources of very high proportions. There is a high level of factors not known here.

	Create project schedules: Large-scale projects require deeper analysis and fragmentation to manage things well. Our automated scheduling system allows baseline management and data collection. If there are some problems that are very complex, you can break them up in tiny parts and then create schedules for those parts and arrange meetings for individual sub-sections.
	Schedule estimates: With our documented schedule estimation methodology you can estimate exactly how much time and how many resources the particular sections of your project will require. The system uses historical data and analysis to help you assign time-related responsibilities to your team members and hold them accountable in case they don't meet the deadlines.
	Conduct critical path analysis: Critical path analysis ability of Projma's time and schedule management module helps you: Calculate the minimum and maximum time that tasks will be started and completed     Estimate the minimum time that the whole project will take to complete     Identify if resources are not being used effectively     Zero-in on any tasks that could create a possible delay     Our module helps you derive dependencies such as the availability of resources, various lead times needed, and other factors that can affect the project but are not directly under your hand.
	Schedule tracking: This elaborate section lets you document the progress of various procedures for baseline management. You can set schedules for collecting data, procedural flow, analysis, and then report generation based on the analysis.

Important scheduling definitely has great many dependencies but the number is slightly lower compared to Critical scheduling. Unlike Critical scheduling, the visibility of the project is quite high and most of the project updates are available to all the team members to view:

	Create project schedules: This section helps you increase the visibility of your updates so that you can maintain a sense of discipline among your team members. You can trace the progress of your project and document the milestone exit criteria to make sure that one stage is complete before the team moves on to the next stage.
	Schedule estimates: This streamlines your estimation methodology and keeps you on the right track. Strict evaluation procedure is followed before you can upgrade a schedule and make mission-critical changes. The comprehensive data the backend continuously gathers helps you obtain expert advise so that you can lay out realistic schedules for your team members.
	Conduct critical path analysis: You can asses the risks involved using this section so that you can think of the workarounds in a timely manner. You can also re-orient and re-prioritize the dependencies to streamline the progress of your schedule.
	Schedule tracking: Once you have setup a formal baseline you have to make sure everybody sticks to it, and this section helps you do exactly that; it lets you weigh the schedule progress against your tasks baseline. Along with generating comprehensive status reports this section keeps track of the effort put in by your team members, gathers critical data for future processing and asses the overall progress of the schedule vis-à-vis your resources.

In this kind of scheduling there are definite, well-laid-out scheduling goals. Dependencies are not great many and the project scheduling details are partially available and the number of unknowns too is less in this sort of scheduling. The various sections let you:

	Create project schedules: Once our system has gathered sufficient "experience" data you can prepare the top-level Gantt schedule to track the overall progress of your tasks and formulate sub-teams if need be. After preparing the Gantt schedule you can easily map the dependencies with the milestones and the pending tasks and take the needed steps to complete the tasks smoothly.
	Schedule estimates: The historical data lets you compile and document schedule estimates and realign staffing and other resources. This section of Projma's time and schedule management module helps you keep your tasks and procedures smaller than two weeks for efficient manageability. The sooner you find discrepancies, the sooner you can take contingent actions.
	Conduct critical path analysis: It's very critical how you identify the schedule dependencies and then chart your future approach. The corporate performance measurement graph (CPM) helps you generate the critical path and assign the right people to the right tasks. This helps you create an achievable schedule. The efficient reporting engine enables you to shorten the path to manage your scheduling on a micro level.
	Schedule tracking: The comparison between the estimated time spent and the actual time spent helps you revise your scheduling periodically. This gives you a realistic picture of how your organization actually handles the deadlines and how you can further improve the performance, if there is a scope for it.

Informal schedule goals entail mostly simpler dependencies and most of the tasks that follow under this category or the normal, familiar project tasks and they don't greatly (although they do) affect the overall scheduling of your project. Still, it has its own significance and has its subsections:

	Create project schedules: Since tasks under this category are scheduled for short-term milestones you can set shorter date ranges for the completion of your tasks. You can prepare miniature Gantt charts and distribute the plan of action among your team members with great speed using the inbuilt notification feature.
	Schedule estimates: The data gathered through this module helps you estimate schedule durations according to the time your staff takes to complete certain short-term tasks. You can very quickly assess risks involved and recognize and arrange the dependencies.
	Conduct critical path analysis: It's very crucial to keep your team members aware of the critical path so that they know where things are heading to. The Gantt schedule helps you achieve that. It also helps your PM figure out ways to shorten the critical path.
	Schedule tracking: The progress of your tasks should adhere to your baseline projection as closely as possible. This section of Projma's time and schedule management module keeps your original scheduling parameters visible until they are formally altered by your project manager.