Schedule Game #1: Schedule Chicken

I've been meaning to write a series of posts on schedule games, and a story I heard over the weekend has jolted me into writing about schedule chicken.

I'm most familiar with schedule chicken that happens in meetings. Usually in a project status meeting, with the project manager and the project team, especially where the meeting is a form of serial status, everyone claims they're on time. But the reality is that each person is waiting for another person to explain why he or she is not ready. In that case, each person graciously says, "Oh, that's fine with me if you take an extra week or two or three. No problem." Of course it's no problem, if everyone else needs more time.

But I just learned of another schedule chicken. In this case, everyone claims to be on time. And, the developers are checking in code every night and building every night. But imagine there's a milestone, named something like "code freeze." After code freeze, you can't add any more code, all you can do is fix the code that already exists. The day before code freeze, developers check in two to four times as much code as they had any of the previous days before. The results? Sure, you "met" the code freeze milestone, but the build doesn't work, or even worse, you can no longer build. You spend the next week or two (at one of my clients, it was up to three weeks) fixing the code just so you have a successful build. Now that you have a working build (some time later than the testers expected), the testers find all kinds of problems.

Schedule chicken occurs when PMs only measure the milestones (the date), and not the stuff that's created (the feature set) and the progress towards creating that stuff (velocity) and how good that stuff is (the defect levels) all throughout the project. If you know how much progress people are making, you can use your sense of smell to see if all those checkins were really to make code freeze, or were developers covering their tushes to meet the milestone.

When I manage projects, I want to know the reality of the project, whether I like it or not. I don't want to play schedule games with the project team, nor do I want them to play schedule games with me. And if you're in senior management, or are a project sponsor, don't make people "commit" to a project date they don't think they can make, because you're setting yourself up for schedule chicken.