AVOIDING CLASSIC PLANNING MISTAKES

PRACTICAL TIP: 2-1 

As Seattle University's David Umphress has pointed out, watching most organizations develop systems is like watching reruns of Gilligan's Island. At the beginning of each episode, someone comes up with a cockamamie scheme to get off the island that seems to work for a while, but something goes wrong and the castaways find themselves right back where they started—stuck on the island. Similarly, most companies start new projects with grand ideas that seem to work, only to make a classic mistake and deliver the project behind schedule, over budget, or both. Here we summarize four classic mistakes in the planning and project management aspects of the project and discuss how to avoid them:

1. Overly optimistic schedule: Wishful thinking can lead to an overly optimistic schedule that causes analysis and design to be cut short (missing key requirements) and puts intense pressure on the programmers, who produce poor code (full of bugs).

Solution: Don't inflate time estimates; instead, explicitly schedule slack time at the end of each phase to account for the variability in estimates, using the margins of error from Figure 2-19.

2. Failing to monitor the schedule: If the team does not regularly report progress, no one knows if the project is on schedule.

Solution: Require team members to honestly report progress (or the lack of progress) every week. There is no penalty for reporting a lack of progress, but there are immediate sanctions for a misleading report.

3. Failing to update the schedule: When a part of the schedule falls behind (e.g., information gathering uses all of the slack in item 1 above plus 2 weeks), a project team often thinks it can make up the time later by working faster. It can't. This is an early warning that the entire schedule is too optimistic.

Solution: Immediately revise the schedule and inform the project sponsor of the new end date or use timeboxing to reduce functionality or to move it into future versions.

4. Adding people to a late project: When a project misses a schedule, the temptation is to add more people to speed it up. This makes the project take longer because it increases coordination problems and requires staff to take time to explain what has already been done.

Solution: Revise the schedule, use timeboxing, throw away bug-filled code, and add people only to work on an isolated part of the project.

Source: Adapted from Rapid Development, Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1996, pp. 29–50, by Steve McConnell.