A believable plan

As I was catching up on my reading I landed on The Late Finish Strategy by Glen Alleman.  I find that reading his posts usually make me think, sometimes make me smile, and that linking to them make people believe that I’m not that dumb after all…  Often times Glen’s post are about those common sense things that, for some reason, end up being neglected.  Things like knowing what you are trying to deliver or having a believable plan.

In this post he talks about the need for budget and schedule margins.  Most of the time you are not given margins; your team has to fight hard to build them up.  Most of the time you look at your schedule and there is a sea of red tasks; the critical path extends from project beginning to project end with no break.  To state the obvious; if your schedule does not have any slack, it’s not that you MAY get in trouble, you ARE in trouble.

Now, if you are blessed with some slack in your project schedule you are not out of the woods yet.  As the old saying goes: ”How does a project end up late? One day at a time…”  So, however you got that slack, you have to fight tooth and nail to avoid seeing it disappear.  You likely won’t be able to end with all the slack you started with or all the slack you managed to build up but you just can’t give it away or you’ll end up being the meat in a “rock and a hard place” sandwich.  This situation can happen real fast or creep up on you but the result is the same; pain.

I’ll add to Glen’s post that on top of a budget margin and of a schedule margin you also need a personnel margin.  What good are schedule and budget margins if you don’t have the personnel to do the work?  I contend that like for budget and schedule you need a personnel margin.  Why?  Here are a few scenarios were that margin would be useful:

• Your resources are “potentially overcommitted” due to their name or skills being linked to numerous proposals or future projects.  Don’t you love “do not substitute” clauses in contracts?
• You work in a matrix environment, your resources are on “loan”, and the loan is being called.
• Your resources are committed to more than one project and the other project manager (not you of course) dropped the ball, his project is in trouble and he is sucking all available resources.
• Your resources are committed to more than one project, business priorities change and your resources end up overcommitted.  Multitasking and overtime are taking their toll.

Once again, if your schedule does not have any slack, it’s not that you MAY get in trouble, you ARE in trouble.  You must have slack in your schedule, budget, and resources or you plan is not believable and you have to stop lying to yourself and others.

What do you think?  As always comments are welcome.

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Comments

[Stephan Baranowski]

Patrick,
I like the idea of a personnel margin, but I'm not sure I unedrstand what it should be: some 'un-planned' time for each resource or some redundancy in resources?
Thanks
Stephan

[Stephen Holton]

I agree... a plan with no inherent slack is already in trouble...

They taught us a similar lesson in the military; even if we were holding our ground, or pushing ahead, if we had already committed our reserve – then we were in trouble.

The same principle applies to project management; lack of reserve is an automatic risk.

[Patrick Richard]

Stephan,

Thanks for the comment. Redundancy in resources but what I do is build my schedule based on fewer resources than I'm told I'll have. For example, expecting 4 resources I'll build my schedule with 3-3.5 resources.

I also put a margin after the last activity of a deliverable; for example a 5 day delay before the deliverable is turned over.

When I level my resources, the delay creates a schedule margin and the intentional short on resources creates a resource margin. Some people object to that but then can't defend their position when you aske them when was the last time they pulled one or more resources. Always sounds about right...

[Patrick Richard]

Stephen,

What? Another ex-military? Is my blog being invaded? First thing you know we'll do nothing but swap war stories...

By the way, your comment reminds me of when I was a combat engineer; the tables and forms we were using asked for our best estimate and them slapped a 1.25 factor on the whole thing. Margin anyone...