The Scale of The Project

Once the scope of the project has been challenged, socialised and agreed upon, it's time to start estimating the scale of the project.  Clearly, producing a project schedule that significantly underestimates the work and duration of the team will be a suppressive activity.   In fact, due to the aforementioned importance of control in our psyches, a unilateral planning and scheduling activity will be detrimental whether regardless of its quality.  So planning and scheduling must be an activity based on team engagement.

Once again we find ourselves on shaky ground!  If projects can be placed on a scale of certainty - with "concrete" on the one end, where the majority of the project tasks are repetitive and known, and "abstract" on the other, where the project resembles an exploration, it is clear that the frequently proposed technique of "unpacking" the tasks is not universally applicable.

Even for the concrete projects, there is a cognitive tendency called the "Planning Fallacy", which indicates that people underestimate the time taken to complete tasks - people formulating plans typically eliminate factors that they perceive to lie outside of the project, and also tend to discount multiple improbable high-impact risks (since each one is unlikely to happen).  These elements may include things like sickness, vacations, meetings, finishing off old projects, annual review processes, public holidays, departure of key personnel, sudden emergency client needs...

…not to mention the Lake Wobegone Effect:  The tendency to think that our own, current, project team is better than other project teams that have done similar work before - so even with benchmark information for similar tasks, we are prone to make estimating errors with regard to our own teams expected performance.

Clearly it's important to use all the available information to benchmark the activities of the project, but it is also just as important to understand the likely inaccuracy of the schedule, given the risks and certainty level of the project.  Inaccurate estimates of delivery timing make distant resource planning difficult - it's much easier to schedule a vacation than to estimate the implementation date for a complex project - which can often lead to delays in the implementation and further uncertainty.

Again, this is an issue that needs to be raised, carefully communicated, and understood within the team, stakeholders and extended stakeholder groups.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project, Leadership, Black, Book