You and I know that the schedule is an estimate. The project schedule is your best guess about when the project team will reach which milestones, and when the project may complete. But a schedule is not a prediction; it is a guess. So when I meet senior managers who want a project team
You’re a project manager. Your project is proceeding fairly well. You’ve had a few bumps, but you’re making progress. You come into work one day, and there’s a message to meet with the Big Cheese. Big Cheese says, “Stop working on that project. Start on this one!” Not only does this happen once, it
Sometimes, I work with organizations where there’s an implicit agreement not to discuss the schedule. I’ve seen this schedule game in two flavors: the first is Dream Time, where the project team and management believe the schedule, especially if it’s in a scheduling tool with lots of graphs and different colored lines. The other is
A few years ago, I received a call to help out a project in trouble. Unsurprisingly, when I was reviewing what had been done and what still left to do, the PM explained there were many half-implemented features. (The team had not been implementing by feature, but instead by architecture. Each architecture group had
As a younger project manager, I had a conversation with my boss. “We can’t meet your schedule. Here’s what it’s going to take.” My boss said, “You can’t be serious about not meeting my schedule. I’m sure if you just put your mind to it, you’ll meet the date.” My jaw dropped as he
My quarterly column at Stickyminds is up today. It’s called Estimating Testing Time.
A few years ago, a senior manager called me. “We have a project in trouble. We started off hopeful, but now it looks impossible.” I asked a few questions, and discovered they had never done a project like this before. It was bigger, in a different language, on a new platform, with a shorter
I’ve been talking to a beleaguered colleague about his project schedule. “No matter what date I give them (senior management), they want an earlier date. I told them it doesn’t take nine women to make a baby in one month, I need some time for this project!” The Bring me a rock schedule game
I was a fortunate young developer. In my first three months at work, I ran into the 90% done schedule game. I did it to myself. I estimated a particular task was going to take 6 weeks. Of course, being an arrogant and naive developer, it never occurred to me to break the task
I’m thrilled to announce that you can see the announcement of Esther’s and my book, currently entitled Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management Revealed. Yes, this is the book we pair-wrote. We’re in the final stretch. First is working with Andy and Dave and whomever from Pragmatic Bookshelf to make sure we didn’t