Note: This article was first published on Knowledge Hut Blog, our blog partner.
Are you familiar with a situation where a project manager diligently drafts a project schedule and uses it to drive the project for 2-3 weeks and then the schedule goes into cold storage? Either the schedule disappears or gets driven by the project getting executed independent of the schedule.
Most people that I interact with tell me that this is a very common scenario. Why does this happen? How can it be avoided and how can we draft an effective schedule that can actually be used to drive the project till its completion? What are the characteristics of such an effective schedule? Why should a project manager take pains to draw up such an effective schedule and what are the benefits? We have done some research in this area by studying a number of real project schedules and would like to present the findings in this article.
One of the major challenges faced by the software industry is delivering fixed price projects profitably. And poor scheduling is one of the top three areas of challenge, the other two being poor estimates and poor requirements management. While leading a delivery excellence program, I happened to interview several roles and one business unit head revealed that he had won a million dollar deal recently and assigned the best PM of the BU to the project. And when that PM came up with a draft schedule, it had a built-in overrun of 5%. Projects typically follow the Murphy’s law “work expands to fill duration” and people tend to consume all of the allocated duration, even if it is in excess, and on top of the built-in 5% overrun, if there is an additional 20% overrun, then the project would move into a loss zone. Incidentally, the BU head was a pro in scheduling, he sat with the PM, optimized resource allocation and then the schedule came down to utilize only 85% of the originally estimated effort. Mind you, this schedule did not reduce the effort or duration of individual tasks but just carried out resource optimization and boom, the effort reduces by 20%!! This incident highlights that well drafted schedules can play a major role in profitability of fixed price projects. And the ROI can also be huge as spending ½ a day in scrutinizing the schedule lead to a saving of almost two hundred thousand dollars in this case.
Why do schedules go into cold storage in spite of their critical advantages? Because, these schedule are not usable. What makes schedules unusable? Having researched into dozens of schedules, we have found several common factors that make schedules unusable and the top three reasons are explained below.
Having seen the characteristics of unusable schedules, we have also seen the characteristics of usable schedules. It is not necessary that usable schedules are lax schedules. Very tight schedules can also be well-drafted and usable schedules. Our research into schedules that have been successfully used to drive and track projects from inception till end shows that they generally possess a large number of following characteristics.
Well-drafted schedules can provide the PM not only a significant grip but also enough maneuverability to navigate the project to successful completion amidst changes. It is not straightforward to draft schedules and it needs significant application of time and rigor to come up with schedules that are usable. If this rigor and time is invested, it can yield significant non-financial benefits in terms of better project control and financial benefits in terms of cost savings making it a high priority area for PMs to spend their time and energies.