Be Proactive
Perhaps the most critical aspect of being a project
manager/scheduler is to take complete ownership of the schedule. As project managers, we can’t accept
‘hard-coded’ dates given to us by the sponsor, team members or other
stakeholders. In organizations with
limited resources, in particular, it’s critical that we change the conversation
to the following:
Ask Team Members for a commitment to the ‘effort’ (work)
estimate, not delivery dates or durations.
As project managers, we need to understand the true effort of the work
to be performed.
Example: Your developer tells you that she can have the
updated prototype ready in 5 weeks, but when asked to clarify the effort
involved, we discover that it’s only 40 hours of effort. The 5 weeks duration estimate was based on a
week of vacation time (already accounted for in the project calendar), known
commitments on other projects and various support activities.
Ask Resource Managers for a commitment to allocation of
their resources on your project. As
project managers, we need to understand what resources are available to us and
at what percentage.
Example: The developer had previously estimated the scope of
work to be 40 hours of effort (work).
The resource manager now allocates this individual to your project at
50%.
As Project Managers, we should only ever commit to dates
based on effort estimates received from team members and the commitment to
allocation from resource managers. So,
armed with the effort estimate of 40 hours from the team member and 50%
allocation from the resource manager, we can now calculate the true duration (2
weeks) of the task and see the resulting schedule impact based on the complete
dependency network and the supporting calendars. If the result is a missed deadline then we
can have an intelligent conversation with our sponsor about either reducing
scope or allocating more of the resource’s time to the project. While the above
example was very simple, the complexity on projects is typically much greater
and as such, Microsoft Project takes care of more advanced calculations and
factors in non-working time, lead/lag and dependencies as well.
Going forward, any dates given to you by your sponsor or
anyone else on the project should be entered as a ‘deadline’ only, never as a
‘start’ or ‘finish’ date as that would hardcode your schedule and take
ownership away from you.
You are the ‘programmer’, ‘author’ and owner of your
schedule, so don’t make excuses or live your schedule by someone else’s script.
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