Comments on: Avoid This Project Management Schedule vs Requirements Trade-Off Trap!

By: tableaux design

tableaux design — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:42:48 +0000

I bookmark it:)…

[...]check this : http://pmtoolsthatwork.com/avoid-schedule-trade-off-trap…]…

By: Bruce Benson

Bruce Benson — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:49:20 +0000

Sean,

Yes, this happens a lot to me also. I mentioned that this notion is counter intuitive to many people. This simply means that when we try to do it, we get a lot of push back that says “that is not the way to do it!” One of my purposes to writing these kind of articles is to plant the notion that maybe the “common wisdom” approach is not what we always want to do. My best “change management” approach is often to just go and do it – to demonstrate that it works. I’ll do it in parallel with the “conventional” approach (so, yes, it is an extra load with no guarantee of payback) and show how one was a better predictor of what actually happened then the conventional approach.

Hang in there and good luck.

Bruce

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:42:45 +0000

Management is the ART and SCIENCE of defining and accomplishing the objectives of an organization through the effective and efficient use of labor and other resources. Note: it is both an ART and SCIENCE. The ratio between ART and SCIENCE depends on what you’re managing. I studied Project Management in an academic setting long before MS-Project. Today, I’m subject to people who insist on a level of detail within MS-Project that to develop and maintain far exceeds the point of deminishing returns. Theoretically, they’re right, but in practice it falls apart. I see it on project after project, over and over. I try to establish a practical level-set in the beginning and I’m the one who is labeled the “bad project manager”, even though in the end, they circle back to what I said in the first place.

By: Project Management or Death by Detail? | Project Management Tools That Work

Project Management or Death by Detail? | Project Management Tools That Work — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:33:18 +0000

[...] could however, predict with a high degree of certainty when 95% of the features would be done (see avoid this trade off trap). The same was true of fixing defects. We could not predict very well when a particular defect [...]

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:38:01 +0000

RM,

In practice, at least for organizations that are not good at estimating, I’ve rarely seen the long pole stay the same throughout the development cycle. This means you can’t rely on the long pole being … the long pole. With each status update, it often looks more like a horse race on who will finish and in what order.

My conclusion is that it is almost never a 1:1 reduction. I’ve seen it where the overhead processes are so great that it takes something like an 80% drop in requirements to get a 20% reduction in schedule. In this actual situation, this turned out to have a hidden but silver lining. While reducing the schedule was near impossible, increasing the requirements by 450% – which was insane in my book – didn’t actually cause that much problem. I likened the company’s development team to a draft horse (a Clydesdale maybe). You probably can’t make it run very fast, but you sure can load a lot more onto it than you would expect and still get to where you are going in the same amount of time.

Thanks

Bruce