Don't Succumb to PM Long Division Syndrome

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

  Career Development  

Some time back, I took over a high-risk program from a client project manager. The program had a contractually-fixed due date with a material business impact if the date wasn’t met. There was a minimum-bar scope to which we had to adhere: no subtracting scope or adding to scope.

Budget was not an issue; we (fortunately) didn’t have to worry about how much the program cost. The marching orders were clear: hit the date, manage the scope, and don’t worry about money.

The problem was that there was too much scope to hit the date using conventional waterfall or agile methodologies. We had four months to deliver what in reality was eight schedule months of work. Going back and saying, “It can’t be done” wasn’t an option because of the contractual requirement. So we got creative.

We divided the work into four sprints consisting of one or more baseline meetings, development, integration testing, user acceptance testing, and a go-live meeting with our sponsors at the end of each of the four months.

We not only overlapped the sprints, we also overlapped steps within the sprints. In any given sprint, we had concurrent development and integration testing activities with users participating in integration testing to identify potential user acceptance issues earlier (something I refer to as “canary in the mine” testing).

It…

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