Projects on Schedule

Are your projects on schedule, delivering on time?

Project delays are common.  I heard many executives concerned or frustrated with projects missing critical dates.  Many organizations train project leaders in project management (PM) or even hire professional project managers to ensure that projects will meet the milestones.  Project management certifications, such as Project Management Professional® (PMP), have become a hiring preference or job requirement. 

Yet having trained project managers is seldom enough to eliminate project delays.  What is missing?  

Project managers are supposed to manage risks that can cause delays.  However, they also have to work within the confines of the organization, where senior management operate in ways incompatible with the best PM practices. 

An organization’s management practices often lead to unintended consequences, including project delays and missed deadlines.  These management practices include, for example

• Adding new projects without prioritization or additional resources
• Changing the deliverables or expanding the scope of an existing project
• Optimizing utilization by sharing the same critical resources among multiple projects
• Relying on fixed target dates in decision making without understanding the associated assumptions

The last one is worth elaborating. 

In most organizations, project managers prepare a project plan, which includes a schedule with dates of key milestones.  Some plans require more detailed activities and corresponding dates shown on a network diagram (e.g. a Gantt chart).   The activities and their durations can be uncertain, depending on the project.  For example, in a R&D or process improvement project, where the activity outcome is unpredictable and/or the method is unproven, the estimated time to complete a task can have a high degree of uncertainty. 

However, this uncertainty is not always communicated effectively to the decision makers.  A typical schedule given to the senior management is highly simplified and shows only one fixed duration or target date for each activity or milestone.  If not properly explained, this simplified schedule creates a perception of certainty that does not exist.  Unfortunately, many sponsors are not experienced in PM or are too busy to question the uncertainty in the schedule.  They subsequently use those dates for operational decisions and hold the project managers accountable for delivering on schedule.  The result is predictable.

There is no universal solution to project delays because there are many causes.  In addition to having competent project managers, senior management must recognize the impact of their own action on project success. 

The one practice that I recommend to all sponsors is to ask the project managers to show the uncertainty of milestone dates – how likely will it be completed by this date and why?

There are many ways to communicate the uncertainty.  One simple way is to show three scenarios¹.

• Most likely (or 50%/50% sooner or later than this date)
• Most optimistic (or 10% of chance sooner than this date)
• Most pessimistic (or 10% of chance later than this date)

The exact definitions of the three cases are not as important as the practice of using multiple dates to express the uncertainty.  This dialogue allows us to assess the risk more appropriately and make decisions accordingly.

In project management, the emphasis is on planning, not the plan.

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1. Interested readers may want to look up the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).