Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
You're Slipping
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
Your software project is not going to meet schedule. Maybe requirements have taken longer; perhaps in the middle of implementation, the team uncovered something requiring redesign; maybe developers haven’t met one milestone yet and you’re worried about the test time. What do you do?
When software projects begin slipping, they’re talking to you, the project leader. The first slip is a whisper: “Your expectation is not matching my reality. Listen. I can tell you my reality.” If you ignore the first slip, the second slip is a murmur: “Things aren’t quite right. Don’t you want to know what’s going on?” By the third slip, the project says: “Knock-knock. Are you there? Don’t you want to know what’s going on?” At the fourth slip, the project yells: “Hey, you! You didn’t listen when you could act. Now you’ll have to pay.”
Early Project Slips
The first slip is the initial indication that something is wrong. Don’t think you can make up time. You can’t. Use the first slip to evaluate what’s going on versus what you’d like to have going on. When you hit the third or fourth slip, you’ve lost the schedule battle.
As an observant project manager, when you detect an early schedule slip, you have several options, all related to the project quality …
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