Undocumented Features

Ten Simple Things That Can Trip Up Your Project Plan

October 17, 2007 – 9:17 pm

Projects are fraught with disasters.  Things go wrong at every turn.  Estimates are off.  New requirements seem to fall from the sky.  Cost overruns trample over you.

With all the unforeseen disasters that seem to strike, you need to dodge every bullet you can.  Here’s ten simple things to remember when you build your project plan and your budget.  Some of these are elementary to the experienced Project Manager, but it is usually the elementary things that trip us up the most.

1.  How many hours per day do you allocate?

If it’s 8 hour work days, chances are that your plan is off.  People go to meetings.  They read email.  They help users.  They go to the bathroom.  Depending on your company’s environment, a more sensible assumption is 6 hours per day, even less if impromptu meetings are rampant, or if your project team members are responsible for operational support in addition to your project.

2.  People take vacation.  Did you check with them on that?

Your lead developer takes two weeks off during your project a week before you’re supposed to hit QA.  Your lead analyst schedules two days off during the time you were supposed to be meeting with the clients for a JAD session.  These are just a few things that can go wrong.  Make sure you check with every resource in your plan for vacation time scheduled.  Don’t just plan for the days off themselves; anyone connected to operations, for example, who is on vacation for a week is probably going to be useless to your project for at least a day after they get back as they catch up on all the problems that piled up while they were gone.

That brings us to…

3.  Plan for Personal Days and Sick Time

Not only will people be off on planned vacation, they’ll also be off for unscheduled days.  Personal days and sick time will pop up.  For example, some of the things that have popped up in the last year in my projects:

• Deaths in the family
• Ruptured plumbing
• Car Wrecks
• Divorces
• Child Births
• Company Celebrations
• Illnesses
• People moving homes

You get the idea.  People have real lives, and these things will make them be out of office at times that you won’t be able to predict when you write your original project plan.  Don’t forget to allow time for it.

4.  Holidays

This one should be blindingly obvious- remember to check your company’s calendars for time off for holidays.  In addition, don’t forget to check with any clients or vendors- if you need a client to be available for an implementation, and they’re out of office, you’re out of luck.  Also, don’t forget ’pseudo-holidays’ like election days, where your people will not be out of office all day, but they will be in and out, and they will be distracted.

5.  Don’t Forget the Weather

If you live in some parts of the country (oddly enough, the Southeast is a great example of this), you need to allow for the weather.  Here in Nashville, for example, any project during the winter months should realistically allow two days slack for lost time to inclement weather.  At some point it will snow- not necessarily enough to keep people from work, but if it keeps kids from going to school, then frankly that’s the same difference. 

And just as an aside:  yes, we Southerners know that to everyone else in the world, it’s silly to close the schools when there’s an inch of snow.  We don’t do that.  We close schools when there’s an inch of snow, which turns into black ice due to our wierd warning/cooling days/nights, and there’s little or no proper road equipment to get the roads salted properly, and there’s thousands of idiots on the road who don’t remember how to drive on the ice because there’s only ice once or twice a year.  If it were our own lives at stake when those idiots slide all over the road and hit someone, we might just go to work.  That’s not the case.  It’s our kids’ lives when we’re driving them to and from school.  Give us a break…

6.  Items 1-5 will strike your clients and vendors

And you’ll never know until it’s too late.  Plan for this eventuality. 

7.  Other projects will start.  They’ll be more important than yours.

When this happens, it may pull resources away from your project.  Be prepared to adjust your plan accordingly. 

8. Estimates never come in at the low end

People will give you estimates like “2-3 weeks”.  If they do this, the more realistic expectation is 2.5-3 weeks.  This is a natural extension of Parkinson’s law.

9.  You don’t really know exactly what you’re doing

Any worthwhile project will be embraced by your organization- and, as more people get interested and involved, they’ll ask questions, and offer ideas, and your requirements will end up changing.  If it doesn’t, you should worry.  Remember that when this happens, you’ll need to adjust the plan and come up with new estimates.  Don’t panic when this happens.

10.  Prices will change

Did you get a quote on those servers you’ll be needing next spring?  Too bad two months before you bought them, the vendor discontinued them, replaced them with something beefier, and jacked up the price 20%.  These things happen.  Remember to talk to the subject matter experts in your company and inquire on when price jumps typically happen, how often and likely they are, and what kind of spikes you might need to account for in the budget.  If you don’t have the expertise in-house, work with your vendor.  They want to make the sale, and if you don’t have budget, then they might miss out on that sale.  If you are up front with them, there’s a chance that they’ll help you out in predicting what will happen with their future costs.

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