Manage the Schedule / Techniques

4.1.1.1T Manage the Schedule / Techniques

Techniques to Get a Project Back on Schedule (4.1.1.1T.P1)

Just because you monitor your project on an ongoing basis does not mean that you will never miss deadlines. The good thing about proactively managing the schedule is that you will know very quickly if you are trending over the end-date. This will give you an opportunity to put a proactive plan in place to get back on schedule. There is not a simple technique that will do the trick in every case. However, there are many techniques you can apply depending on the cause of the schedule problem. See 4.1.2.2T for techniques to get a project back on schedule.

Make Sure Team Members Know Their Due Dates (4.1.1.1T.P2)

One of the basic responsibilities of the project manager is to assign work to team members. However, some project managers are not always clear on the work to be done and the person that is responsible. This causes uncertainty in the team and can result in some activities running late. In fact, if you have managed projects for a while, you have probably run into this situation. You might ask a team member the status of a critical assignment and he may tell you that he did not realize that he was assigned to the activity. A good way to test whether your directions and assignments are clear is to ask team members what they are responsible for completing in the next two weeks. This is not something you need to do with every team member every week. However, it can be valuable to ask once in a while, or when a critical activity is due, just to validate whether you are assigning activities clearly. If the team members know what is expected of them, chances are that you are effectively and clearly assigning the work. However, if team members give you different answers than you expect, it may mean that you need to work on being clearer and more precise.

If team members understand the work perfectly but don’t deliver on time, you may have a performance problem. If they deliver the wrong work to you, on time, you also have a problem. However, if the team member is not clear about the work he has been assigned or the due date, then the project manager may have a communication problem.

When you assign work to team members, be clear about the following:

Activity name(s), from the schedule
An explanation, if necessary, of what the work entails
Start-date and end-date. The project manager needs to be clear on when the activity can start (probably immediately) and when the activity is due. If the team member cannot meet the deadline date, he needs to let the project manager know as soon as possible.
Estimated effort hours (optional). The project manager should communicate the estimated hours required to complete the activity. This is usually of secondary importance compared to the due date. If the team member cannot complete the activities within the estimated effort hours, he needs to let the project manager know as soon as possible. However, on most projects, if the activity is completed on schedule, it is not as important if the work took more or fewer actual effort hours.
Estimated costs (optional). If the team member cannot complete the work within the cost estimate, he needs to let the project manager know as soon as possible. If the activity only includes labor, the cost overrun will be directly related to an overage in labor hours. However, if there are non-labor charges involved in the activity, it is possible that these non-labor costs could be over budget.
Deliverable. The team member needs to understand the deliverable or work component (a portion of a larger deliverable) that he is expected to complete. If there are quality criteria to meet, the team member should know these quality requirements.
Dependencies. Make sure the team member knows his relationship with other activities – ones that are waiting on him or ones that must be completed before his can start.
Other resources. If multiple resources are working on the same activities, they must all understand who the team members are and they need to know who has overall responsibility for the activity.

Manage Schedule within Tolerances (4.1.1.1T.P3)

When you manage the schedule, you do not need to be accurate to the minute. You also do not want make all kinds of proactive changes if your project is a day over deadline one week and a day ahead of schedule the next. Your client does not expect that level of accuracy in your schedule management and he is not interested in knowing whether your project is one hour ahead or behind schedule at any given time.

As the project manager, you should understand the tolerance level for your project. For example, let’s say you are updating your schedule and you realize you are trending two weeks late. Should you raise an issue or a schedule risk? Should you inform your client? It depends on your tolerance level. If you have a three month project, you should probably be concerned, because you are trending almost 20% over your deadline. On the other hand, if your project is two years long, then two weeks is not material at all (in fact you would be a hero if you delivered within two weeks).

Some projects have no tolerance and must be completed on schedule. This may be true with projects that receive government funding or projects that must be completed by the end of the fiscal year.

Use common sense and work with your client on the tolerance levels for budget and deadline. If you stay within the tolerances, you are fine. If you go outside those limits, you should be concerned.

Validate Who Can Update the Schedule on Your Project (4.1.1.1T.P4)

In most projects the project manager is responsible for the schedule and he updates it on a weekly basis. In most projects the project manager is the only one that is allowed to update the schedule. However, there are other options, especially for larger projects.

In some cases, the project manager may ask each team member to update the schedule with a current status and effort hours (if they are being tracked). In this scenario, the team members normally indicate whether their assigned work is completed. If not, they adjust the end-date to reflect when the activity will be complete. They can also plug in their actual effort hours per activity so far. In most cases, team members are not allowed to assign themselves to new work, add new activities or otherwise alter the schedule. After the team members update the plan with current status, the project manager can begin to evaluate the overall project status.

For very large projects, it is also common for one or more people to be assigned to update the schedule on behalf of the project manager. These people are sometimes called project administrators. They can get information from team members and update current status and actual hours worked. They can run a standard set of reports for the project manager and get additional information from team members for anything that looks unusual. They bring this all to the project manager for final analysis and evaluation. The project administrator performs much of the logistics associated with the schedule, but it is still the responsibility of the project manager to understand what is going on and make the appropriate decisions to complete the project successfully.

Don’t Manage by Percent Complete (4.1.1.1T.P5)

Most project management scheduling tools have a field for entering the percentage complete for each activity. Before an activity starts, it is 0% complete. When it is finished, it is 100% complete. However, in between can be tricky. On the surface, if a team member were 20 hours into a 40 hour activity, you would say he is 50% complete. But is he? He may be close to done, or he may be only 10% done.

The project manager could ask team members to report on their percent complete, but in many cases you will get an inaccurate number. If the activity is overdue, for example, the team member often gives the “90% complete” answer. This means that the first week the activity is late the team member says it is 90% done, the next week it is 95% done, the next week 99% done, etc.

A better way to get the information you need is to ask ‘When will the work be done?’ If the schedule shows an activity should be completed on the last day of the week, and the work is not done, don’t ask the team member for the percentage complete. Instead ask the team member ‘When will the work be done?’ Asking when the work will be completed gives you concrete information you can place on your schedule, while also getting the team member to make another commitment to the new end-date.

Manage the Schedule by Due Date (4.1.1.1T.P6)

In most organizations, once the project starts the team does not collect the actual effort hours worked on each activity. Unless tracking effort hours is important to your organization, the project manager should feel comfortable to manage the project schedule based on completion dates – not effort hours.

For example, assume you have an activity that is scheduled to take 40 hours and has two-week duration. If the work is done within the two weeks, it may not be as important to know if the work actually took 35 hours or 50. It would only be important if the difference in effort hours caused another assigned activity due date to be missed. The effort hours are important in the estimating process since they help set completion dates and help balance workloads. But when the activities are assigned, getting the work done on time is most important.

If the work is being done by a resource that you are compensating on an hourly basis, it is important to understand both the effort hours and completion date. Now it does matter whether the 40–hour activity actually took 50 hours, since there is an incremental cost to your project.

Use Milestones to Take a Checkpoint and Validate Your Status (4.1.1.1T.P7)

A milestone is a scheduling event that signifies the completion of a major deliverable or a set of related deliverables. A milestone, by definition, has duration of zero and no effort. Milestones are great for managers and the sponsor because they provide an opportunity to validate the current state of the project and what the future looks like.

If the milestone is important enough you could perform an end-of phase review. However, many milestones represent the completion of smaller deliverables or deliverable components and don’t rise to the level of holding a full end-of-phase review.

You can do the following activities at every milestone:

Validate that work done up to this point is correct and accurate. The client should have approved any external deliverables produced up to this point.
Make sure that the rest of the project schedule includes all the activities necessary to complete the project.
Double-check the effort, duration and cost estimates for the remaining work. Based on prior work completed to date, you may have a much better feel for whether the remaining estimates are accurate. If they are not, you will need to modify the schedule. If it appears that your budget or deadline will not be met, raise an issue and resolve the problems now.
Issue a formal status update and make any other communications specified in the Communication Management Plan.
Evaluate the Risk Management Plan for previously identified risks to ensure the risks are being managed successfully. You should also perform another risk assessment to identify new risks.
Update all other project management logs and reports.

These activities should be done on a regular basis, but a milestone date is a good time to catch up, validate where you are at, get clear on what’s next and get prepared to charge ahead.

Use a Project Audit to Validate Your Schedule Status (4.1.1.1T.P8)

Sometimes the project manager can get too comfortable (or too uncomfortable) in how the project is progressing. In many cases, it makes sense to have an outside party come in to evaluate the project management processes being utilized and double-check that the project is progressing as expected. This “outside party” could be any qualified person outside of the project manager. In some cases, your organization may have an internal project audit specialist. It is possible that the Project Director or the Project Sponsor could also perform this audit. The outside party could be an outside contractor or consultant, but they do not need to be.

The project manager or functional manager might call for a project audit as part of an overall quality management program. In some cases, such as a government project, periodic audits may be called for as a part of the overall contract. In any event, an outside audit should provide comfort to the project stakeholders that effective project management processes are being utilized and that the project appears to be on-track.

A project audit focuses on quality assurance – asking questions about the processes used to build deliverables. You can find more information on quality assurance techniques at 3.4P Perform Quality Assurance.

Investigate Further When ‘Completed’ Activities Are Not Really Completed (4.1.1.1T.P9)

Sometimes a team member says that an activity is complete when in reality it is not quite done. This can happen for the following reasons:

The activity should have been completed and the team member believes he needs just a short amount of time to complete it. He might say it is complete and then finish it up quickly, rather than deal with the consequences of the activity being late.
A deliverable is ’completed’ by the team member but not approved. The team member may say the work is complete, but when the deliverable is checked it is discovered that it is incomplete or needs additional follow-up work.

To avoid this, make sure that there is an approval process for all major deliverables, and that the schedule leaves time for the approval process and for rework based on feedback. Then there is no question that the deliverable is completed, because it has either been approved or it hasn’t. If an activity does not call for the total completion of a deliverable, you would expect that when a team member says an activity is completed, it probably is. If you find a pattern of this not being the case, the individual team member might need coaching on how to better report the status of his work, or you might have to deal with a performance problem.

Manage Action Items in Your Schedule (4.1.1.1T.P10)

Action items are nothing more than work that needs to be done to complete an activity, answer an outstanding question, etc. The work is usually ad-hoc, say as the result of a meeting, and it has a short duration, usually to be completed by the next meeting. One technique to ensure that action items are completed is to place them in the schedule. For further information, see 4.1.1.2T Action Items.

Use the Concept of Triple Constraint to Manage Cost, Schedule and Scope (4.1.1.1T.P11)

At the end of the Definition and Planning process (Steps 2.1P and 2.2P) you should have an agreement with your sponsor on the work that will be completed and the cost (or hours) and duration that are needed to complete the work. These three items then form a concept called the “triple constraint”. If one of the three items change, at least one, if not both, of the other items need to change as well.

This is more than an academic discussion. The concept actually has great relevance to the management of the project. The triple constraint makes logical sense and can be easily explained to your clients as well.

This concept is easy to visualize if you think of the triple constraint as a triangle, with the sides representing cost, duration and scope of work.
If the scope of work increases, the cost and / or deadline must increase as well. This makes sense. If you have more work to do, it will take more cost (effort) and perhaps a longer duration. (Likewise if you reduce the scope of work, the cost (effort) and / or the deadline should decrease as well.)
If you are asked to accelerate the project and complete it earlier than scheduled, it would also be logical to ask for less work. However, if you are asked to deliver the same work for less duration, the third leg of the triple constraint must increase to maintain the balance. This should also make sense. You will need to increase costs (effort), perhaps by working overtime hours or perhaps by bringing in more resources to complete the same amount of work earlier.

Once the project manager really recognizes this relationship in the triple constraint, he will automatically recognize when one leg changes and instantly look for ways that the other legs will change to maintain the triple constraint balance.

Manage at Different Levels of Detail Based on the Situation (4.1.1.1T.P12)

Two of the common responsibilities of all managers are the management of people and the management of work (if you don’t do either, you are not really a manager). All managers need to have timely, relevant and accurate information so that they can manage their people and work effectively. The trick, of course, is to know how much information you need, and at what level.

Some managers like to stay out of the details. They may be able to tell you whether the work is generally on schedule, but not what the project team members are working on at any given time. Sometimes you can get away with this. However, in some cases, you can be seen as aloof and out of touch. The problem is that sometimes these managers need to get engaged in the details of a project to determine what is going on, and they are not able to do it. Sometimes, they prefer to stick with the “big picture” even when the project is a mess.

On the other hand, you could be on top of people all the time – asking them how things are going, helping them resolve minor problems, assigning some of their work to someone else if it looks like they are a little behind. You know these types of managers as well. They are the infamous “micromanagers.” They actually spend so much time in the details that it takes them twice as long to get anything done. These managers also cause frustration on the part of team members because it seems they don’t trust the team to get anything done.

Many managers are afraid of being labeled a “micromanager” because of all the negative connotations. However, there are times when you do need to assign work and get feedback on a very frequent basis. This is usually the case if you have a major short-term crunch of work to complete. It is especially relevant if your project team is not providing the short-term feedback you need to understand exactly where the project is.

A good approach to workload management is to be a “situational manager”. This type of manager provides overall guidance and coaching to the team and tries to remove any roadblocks. However, when a project gets behind, or the project gets to a point where a lot needs to happen in a short amount of time, this manager can quickly move down to managing the details.

Be Proactive and Very Communicative When Managing Projects with Unrealistic Deadlines (4.1.1.1T.P13)

If you are a project manager dealing with what you perceive to be an unrealistic deadline, the first thing you will want to do is discuss this with your sponsor to see if there are any factors that are driving the project deadline. For instance, there may be a business driver that is driving the deadline. There may be some event occurring that this project needs to support. On the other hand, sometimes managers set arbitrary end-dates just to provide what they consider to be stretch objectives. It does not necessarily make your challenge any easier, but you may find that by better understanding the reason for the deadline, you may have an easier time getting yourself and your team members motivated to achieve it.

Once you understand the motivation for the deadline date, there are project management techniques that can be utilized to increase the chances of success and better manage expectations.

Try to increase resources. All projects require some time and cost to create the deliverables agreed to in the project scope. If you find that the time constraint is not in alignment with cost and scope, talk to your manager about increasing the resources that are available for the project. Adding resources to the project makes the cost go up, but may allow you to hit the deadline.
Reduce scope. Talk to your sponsor about reducing the project scope. See if there are features and functionality that he can live without for now so that you can deliver the project within the deadline specified.
Identify and manage the deadline as a project risk. Utilizing risk management will help better manage expectations early in the project and also be a way to gather input and ideas for ways that you might be able to hit the deadline.
Manage scope with zero tolerance. On many projects, you start with an aggressive delivery date, and then the situation gets worse because the project manager does not effectively manage scope. If you are on a project with an unrealistic end-date to begin with, it is absolutely critical that you manage scope effectively and do not increase scope without an approved scope change request. Disciplined scope management will ensure that you only have to deliver what was originally promised, and that any approved changes are accompanied by a corresponding increase in budget and timeline.
Manage the schedule aggressively. In many projects, you might get a little behind but have confidence that you can make up the time later. However, when you start a project with the deadline at risk, be sure to manage the schedule diligently. you have no margin for error. As you monitor the schedule, treat missed deadlines as problems and work hard to solve the reasons behind the slippage.
Look for process improvement opportunities. Lastly, take an honest look at your schedule and your approach for executing the project. Talk to your team, clients, and manager about any ideas they may have for making the project go faster. This will get everyone thinking about being part of a solution. For instance, perhaps you could utilize a Joint Application Development (JAD) session to gather requirements more quickly than traditional interviewing techniques.

Although it appears that you are being held accountable for events and circumstances that are not within your control, you do have control over the processes you use to manage the project. First, see if you can balance the early deadline by increasing resources or reducing project scope. Second, proactively manage risk, scope and the schedule. Third, work with your manager, client and project team to uncover ideas and techniques that will allow you to deliver the project sooner that you might have first thought possible.

Project Managers Need to Set Deadlines, Even if the Client Doesn’t (4.1.1.1T.P14)

Many projects have firm deadlines that are the result of business constraints, the fiscal calendar or the relationship with other projects. However, many projects do not have a firm external deadline. In fact, your sponsor may want the project completed as soon as possible, but the sponsor does not have a reason why the deadline should be one date versus another.

All projects, by definition, need an end-date. When you manage projects that do not have a firm deadline, it is important to work with the project team to set one. You still create a Project Charter and schedule based on the best guess of the resources available and work effort required. Also, bring the team into the planning process so everyone knows what you are shooting for. Once the team agrees with the schedule, then that becomes your firm end-date, and you should manage it as firmly as if there was a business driver behind it.

A project team without a firm deadline will be unfocused and will ultimately take much longer to deliver than necessary. The project manager should work with the project team to set a reasonable deadline and then hold everyone accountable for that date. This allows the team to work with purpose and focus. It is also a way of making sure that the projects don’t continue indefinitely. Even if the client does not have a sense of urgency for when the project is completed, you will want to make sure that the project team does not have this same attitude.

Make Sure Your Team Meet Your Deadlines – Even When the Client is Not Meeting Theirs (4.1.1.1T.P15)

Many project managers face situations where they are asked to meet fixed dates with very little, if any, margin for slippage. It is hard enough to manage the dates on your own team, but sometimes your clients magnify the challenge by not meeting their commitments. For instance, they may not be available when you need them or they may not approve critical deliverables when they say they will. This can lead to more project delays.

From a project management perspective, you need to proactively utilize risk management, issues management, scope management, and proactive communication to your best advantage.

Manage client deadlines as a risk. Identifying client responsiveness as a risk allows you to communicate the concern and maintain focus on the risk throughout the project. It also allows you to identify additional activities that will help you manage this risk.
Manage communication and expectations. Proactive communications will help ensure that your clients understand what is expected of them and the consequences of missing their deadline dates.
Manage missed deadlines as an issue. If the clients end up not meeting their dates in spite of your risk management plans, then you have an issue that needs to be addressed. Issues management (problem identification and resolution) needs to be performed. You do not have direct authority over the clients, so the issues management process helps you gain more visibility from your manager and the client managers for helping to resolve project resource problems.

Although it appears that you are being held accountable for client behavior that is not within your control, you do have control over the processes you use to manage the project. Manage risk, communication and issues proactively and utilize your manager and your sponsor to try to get everyone focused on meeting the deadlines.