Risk and Time Management

In keeping with our last post, we discuss risks due to insufficient time management that often result in project failures.  As is with many things, the symptom of the failure has roots much earlier.  In other words, when we witness the failure, it was due to some event(s) or activities much earlier.

 Risk and Time Management Taxonomy

We provide a brief list of some of the miss-steps we make along the way that will influence our probability of success.

• formal time reporting
• organizations time reporting processing
• overly optimistic task scheduling
• no accounting for task variance (point source task duration estimates)
• missing tasks and task dependencies
• poorly identified and quantified metrics for monitoring
• poor data collecting for metrics
• insufficient or lack of monitoring of metrics
• little or no follow up on the schedule
• lack of proactive actions taken when the schedule appears to be slipping
• poorly defined activities including what constitutes success for activity
• missing expertise in scope decomposition to tasks
• duration estimated from inexperienced sources
• poor use of historical record for estimates
• not adapting schedule based upon performance metrics
• miss match of plan and tasks to available competencies

 Risk and Time Management Conclusion

There can be little doubt there are many more mistakes we can make that will degrade the probability of success when it comes to project time management.  Our up front steps play a significant role in our success.  This must include identifying key performance metrics (rate of accomplishment and schedule).  We couple this with monitoring these metrics and adapting as we learn the difference between what we thought our performance would look like and what is actually happening and make the necessary adjustments.