If you manage software or hardware development projects, then you know these problems.
• Over estimates of percentage completion of tasks
• Under estimates of time to complete tasks
• Delayed reporting of issues that will impact schedule and scope
• Expectation that delays are inevitable and excusable
The situation often looks something like this. On Monday, the project manager asks, “When can you get that done?” The developer says, “In two weeks.” “For sure?” “I’ll do my best.”
The next Monday the developer says the work is half done. The following week he says he’ll need another week but he’s got a good “The dog ate my homework” excuse. Sometimes it is assignments from other managers. Other times it’s the need to rework a handoff from another department or a technical support emergency from an important customer.
Typically you and other managers get surprised when an individual or team suddenly but belatedly reports that they will miss a due date. You have too little time to adapt completely, creating a crisis requiring excessive time pressure and overtime. You may decide to overrun in time or take a penalty in quality and/or scope. So you miss a market window, face higher support costs after release, or lose market share with releases that lack quality and competitive features.
Of course, the way to improve the accuracy of status reports and time-to-complete estimates during project execution is to make the estimates more granular. The difficulty lies in finding a practical way to deal with a finer grained breakdown of tasks without overloading project managers and team members with time consuming administrative work.
Solution
Break project tasks into assignments the specific individual can do in no more than 16 hours. This will improve the accuracy of estimating how long each assignment will take. Have the team members do their own breakdowns a week or two at a time. Each person can do this in less than 5 minutes, so project managers aren’t burdened with details they haven’t the time and perhaps not the information to handle. Eliminate percentage completion reporting. Tasks are either done or not done. Since the tasks are quite granular, the round off error from not counting partially completed tasks will be small.
In summary, this solution has these key elements:
1. Improve the accuracy of estimates by breaking tasks into smaller sub-tasks or assignments. With assignments that take 4 to 16 hours of work, each person will have only 2 to 5 assignments per week for the projects they work on.
2. Have team members draft their own detailed assignments. They can do this better than the project manager and will feel more committed.
3. Have team members do these breakdowns weekly, for just the next week or two. This should only take each person 5 minutes per week. Have them do this just before or at the beginning of the weekly team meeting.
4. Once an assignment is made, it is either in progress or done. Forget about percentage completion reporting at the level of individual team member assignments.
Peter Lenn is CEO of The Daniels Group, LLC. More information is available at www.ProjectProMeetings.com. For a quick overview of ways to improve project performance, watch these three short videos: Executive Briefing, why everyone Hates Project Meetings and ProjectPro Meetings Cut Time to Market.
