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Why schedule?
The difficulty with a schedule with a self-scheduled project is that the project manager has no substantial carrot or stick to use to motivate team members. Therefore, the team must create a motivator to ensure that the project is done in a timely manor. A schedule helps the team do that because it lets the team agree on when things should be completed and compare their progress to what they had said they would do. Much like a charter, the schedule enables a new form of agreement among the team and improves communication. It makes it obvious when team members are slacking off, and also when they are pulling a lot of weight -- it enables additional peer pressure as a motivator.
Problems with schedules
Though the team did not encounter this, if a schedule is too lax it can cause the team to spend too little time on a project because they budgeted too much time for a section. Therefore, the schedule should be revised by agreement of the entire team as the project progresses. Care must be taken to not make the schedule too flexible, however, or else it will lose its power.
Our schedule
The team decided to create a full project plan using Microsoft Project© as their media. The above image displays the schedule with the details omitted; essentially, the plan was to create three major revisions of the mechanical hardware, two major versions of the software and one revision of the electrical hardware. The team had experience building motor controllers from past projects and due to the similarity of this motor controller to ones they had built in the past, the team was confident in building the electrical hardware. The only real design difficulty from an electrical standpoint would be to make the whole thing inexpensive, but at this point that constraint was not included for the prototype design.