Major Roots of Project Slippage

Slippage of the scope, time and budget happens often on the projects. As the result both duration and cost may troubled. Inflexibility of a selected project management framework and practices may also add miscalculation of outcomes, over-pressure on resources, low moral and consequent business loses. The sources of slippage usually lay in the beginning of projects and arise from poor planning.

5 Major Planning Flaws Make Schedule Unrealistic or Flown

1. Not having or not coordinating a clearly documented approach to ‘how to estimate and plan‘ (!) the project. The selected methodologies and approaches to estimating and planning should be coordinated with all parties involved in the activities throughout the project. The document described the estimating and planning approach should be a part of the project documentation.
2. Not confirming the validity and robustness of the project management processes and templates or not improving them for the specific project. It is a part of the Project Manager’s responsibility putting together, constantly improving and properly coordinating the project processes. If the processes do not fit the project, the incidents will be repeating. The documented processes should be stored in an accessible repository, also communicated, discussed and agreed with all parties involved in the processes. Even if the processes haven’t been changed since the “stone age”, their understanding should be confirmed by the team.
3. Calculating the budget based on duration rather than efforts. It is an essential rule that costs of resources should reflect the time for specific work on the project deliverables described in the scope. This should also counts the time for learning of project materials, meetings, travel, and other activities and expenses directly related to the project (i.e. float of currency, taxes, celebration of milestones and achievements, social events with external parties, gifts, etc.). The significant time-lags, like waiting for verification or testing by another party, acceptance, approval, or authorization, should be fulfilled with other activities or a standby resources should be temporary reassigned to another project.
4. Allocating resources 100% throughout the project or its parts. The phenomena of extending time-lags often becomes a reason for significant reduction of resource utilization and increased costs. The remedy is strait forward: plan the time-lags in advance, estimate the efforts against specific resource requirements and/or coordinate with specific resources, if they are available during planning. During planning, worn the resources that actual numbers (actuals) will be counted and charged against the efforts, not overall duration, and point to this detail along with work authorization message. In that case, the person will be assigned only for the specified time periods to deliver specific results withing the agreed time. That time, however, should also include learning and debating of the project materials.
5. Not having a breakdown of the budget against the deliverables (described in the scope statement) and schedule or not properly maintaining the changes, when occur. The breakdowns should clearly reflecting the schedule and estimated costs of specific deliverables, including the outcomes of the project manager’s work. The precision of estimates, however, defines the efforts, time and costs of the work required for estimating and planning. It is clear, the definitive estimation takes way longer that ROM (rough order of magnitude) and costs way higher.

I encourage the reader to debate this article and your experiences in avoiding project slippage or putting your projects back on track; this is a good opportunity to contribute to the project management practices and make difference.