Comments on: Impossible Schedules Reinforce No Thinking

By: Glen B Alleman

Glen B Alleman — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 20:00:30 +0000

Johanna,
We have a large post hanging in the planning area for our program (a $2B spacecraft project).
“You can con people into accepting a suicidal schedule, but you can’t con them into meeting it.”
Without proper planning process noone will ever know if the schedule is “meetable.”
The schedule tradeoff process is continuous as is the performance measurement, risk assessment and mitigation, and rolling wave planning. Without these (and probably many more) process the schedule becomes imposible without anyone actually knowing it.

By: Adam Jacobson

Adam Jacobson — Sat, 11 Jun 2005 01:01:16 +0000

the question is: What’s difficult and what’s impossible?
I work mostly with software implementation rather than development. Ask a Big Four firm whether they could accomplish something which a smaller firm has to do routinely, they would say impossible.
BTW, why did you bold “in my experience”. People giving you flack? Its your blog so of course its your experience.

By: bob

bob — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 22:45:02 +0000

The push can be helpful, especially if it clarifies the goals and aspirations. It still feels awful though :-) until you get into the context deeply enough. That just took me a month (coming from ecommerce development to a data warehouse team).
The hard bit is explaining why a reliable promise is not possible yet. People who are themselves under pressure will want demonstrable progress from us, and will want to know when they can have it.
So, when time is critical, how little can we deliver quickly and still provide benefit? And how long do we have before we have to make some reliable promises about progress?
I discovered a piece today by Kem Caner (via Brian Marick) that I found helped me to think about this:
http://www.kaner.com/negotiate.htm
Hope it helps someone else too.

By: Trave Daynor

Trave Daynor — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:34:57 +0000

You can push good guys