Design scheduling, organizing, and finalizing process is a critical aspect of project management, enabling teams to plan, coordinate, and track their work effectively. This process involves several steps and best practices that can be applied across various industries, including software development, construction, design, and more.

Scheduling

Scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling, and optimizing work and workloads in a production process. It involves defining what needs to be done, when it needs to be delivered, and what resources need to be utilized.

A project schedule is a document that outlines the order of work, resources required, and how long different parts of the work will take. It's used throughout the project management life cycle and is typically created during a project’s early stages but is referred to throughout its life cycle.

To create a project schedule, you can follow these steps:

1. Hold a brainstorming meeting: Include team members who will be working on the project. They can provide unique insights into how long work will take and what their own capabilities are.
2. Define the critical path: This is the process of determining the best path to take through all tasks/activities in order to finish a project on time. It involves looking at the project at a high level, breaking it into the most critical tasks, and calculating the time to complete the whole project based on the time it will take to complete those tasks.
3. Estimate task duration: This refers to the number of working hours, days, weeks, or months that you expect team members will need to complete a task.
4. Identify task dependencies: Use a process of arranging tasks in the order in which they would logically fall. Defining the priority of each task also helps ensure the most important tasks are completed first.

Organizing

Organizing involves assigning the right people to perform the right tasks, ensuring the workload is distributed evenly so no one is overburdened. It's important to build your schedule around deliverables and milestones, not around tasks. If the schedule is built around tasks, it’s hard to tell whether changes stakeholders request fall within the project scope.

Finalizing

Finalizing the design process involves getting final approval from the client and formally closing out the project. Your schedule should include deadlines and details for these processes.

In the final stages, it's important to build-in controls to prevent changes that fall outside of the project scope from being approved. For instance, any client changes that would delay a project by more than one day could automatically be escalated to a panel of client and team representatives for review.

After the schedule has been approved, you now have a "baseline schedule." This is a living document, and it may be revised at various points throughout the project life cycle.

In summary, the scheduling, organizing, and finalizing process in design is a complex and iterative procedure that requires careful planning, monitoring, and adjustments to ensure a project's success.

TIPS:

• Read the design brief carefully and ask questions if you need more information - design briefs always involve interpretation by the designer.
• It's a good idea to set a series of checkpoint meetings/approvals with your client as you work through the design process - it's a better practice to have the client approve or reject an approach at the early stages, at which point you can adjust your design thinking accordingly.