Didn’t We Already Plan?
By Phil Almeroth | Business Transformation Capability Lead
In doing Project Work (recall from past posts: Projects, Operations, and Research are 3 different kinds of work), a good schedule and estimates are necessary to get off to a strong start. But many make the mistake of believing the schedule and estimates, once completed, can be framed and will guide the work through the rest of the project. As a Project Manager, part of your job is to instill continuous planning into the work of your project. As a project participant, your estimates are important to project success.
Over the years, I’ve compiled some estimating “rules”; these are not all original to me. Like everyone else, I’ve accumulated and adapted wisdom gleaned from others, and assembled them into a list of reminders for me when leading project teams. I’m sharing them with you; feel free to take them and adapt them for how they fit with your projects.
- Everything takes longer than you think (sometimes a lot longer)
- Everything takes longer than it takes
- Thinking about everything takes longer than you think
- Estimates from others are always optimistic (generally REALLY optimistic), therefore schedules are (almost) always wrong
- If you underestimated an early task when you created the schedule, you probably underestimated middle and later tasks. Revisit the whole schedule ASAP when you find schedule (estimate) errors.
- People (especially leadership) REALLY do use your estimates for planning. Be able to express your level of confidence on estimates when you provide them to others.
- A good schedule and estimate confidence level is 80% for near term deliverables, 60% for long-term deliverables. At a minimum, revisit the schedule and revise your estimates after the What is Needed (Requirements) and How to Meet the What (Design) are agreed upon to improve on the early confidence levels.
- Don’t let yourself be bullied into committing to something you cannot achieve.
- Don’t bully someone else into committing to something they cannot achieve.
- Sitting on bad news only makes it stink worse. Let your sponsor know ASAP if there is a significant or potential problem in meeting the schedule. Reality eventually overtakes early optimism in the schedule. Note: It’s an art to not over-do this.
- Let team members know that you expect ASAP notification of schedule problems or risks.
- Most people’s estimating skills improve with experience; some don’t.
- Learn your own estimating flaws and compensate for them.
- Learn the flaws in your new estimations and compensate for them. Repeat continuously while employed as a project manager.
- Learn others’ estimating flaws and learn to compensate for them. Mentor them on improving their flaws and then compensate for their improvements. Repeat continuously while they are on your project team.
- Some people are hedging their estimates, some people are expecting others to hedge the estimates, and some people are doing neither. It’s an interesting problem to get all of them to stop this behavior and have people give honest, best-effort estimates. Like it or not, we have to deal with these “real world effects” on the projects we manage.
- Be wary of anyone who believes in “all ya gotta do” thinking, and and/or wants 100% confidence in an estimate. Even with a really good plan and data, 90% confidence is an exceptional human achievement for any complex task.
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