Project Pains?

  Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)  

Project plans are vital to determine the cost of a project and control its execution. However, in order to accomplish these two goals, plans must be fairly precise. A project schedule that's +/- 10 percent accurate is extremely useful to the management team because they can correctly estimate the cost of a project and its release schedule. On the other hand, a guesstimate that's +/- 30 percent accurate serves no real purpose.

One of the most common problems for overly optimistic project schedules is the project manager's failure to account for all the activities required to complete the project. While most technical project managers are fairly precise at estimating the effort required to implement a specific feature, many can't accurately determine the overall duration of a larger software development project. Their Gantt charts highlight the core activities required to complete the project, but neglect to account for the derivative tasks that take up a good portion of the developer's time.

Core Activities

By core activities, I mean actions or deliverables typical of 95 percent of the project plans, such as:

• Release definition
• High level architecture
• Detailed design
• Implementation
• Unit and feature tests
• System test
• Packaging and installation programs
• Creation of user documentation
• Creation of customer …

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