The Problem By far, the most common project management “methodology” I come across is the “pick a date and we’ll figure it out” approach. Practitioners of this approach create lists of tasks and pin those tasks to dates. This is a project “worst practice.” This is a dartboard approach. When relatively simple practices can dramatically…
The weather was sunny and dry in New Mexico, but the seemingly daily storm clouds were already forming over the mountain peaks to the west. The teenager apprehensively looked up from the map and compass laying on the ground. “Isn’t there an app for this?” A crew of 10 youth and adults were preparing to…
Brace yourself. What follows is sound logic behind using low-side estimates for project plan task scheduling — assuming you also adopt a breakthrough method to deal with project plan uncertainty. Conventional wisdom tells us to protect a project from uncertainty by “adding” EXTRA TIME into each task estimate. That’s often called “safety.” While seeming perfectly…
In Part One of this blog I made a strong case as to why using high-end task duration estimates is not the way to go when scheduling your project. High-end estimates extend project timelines in both planning and practice. To recap, implications of using high-end estimates are: 1) Project end dates are greatly extended from…