Don’t Fool Your Schedule

Vincent is a Senior Project Management Consultant and e-Learning Developer.

  Estimating   Risk Management   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)   ProjectsAtWork  

Too many project managers separate risk analysis from their schedule development, leading to overly optimistic estimates and unwelcome suprises along the way. Here is a holistic approach for making risk analysis an integral part of schedule creation, which, in turn, will help you and your team generate more realistic estimates.

All projects have some uncertainty, which is just another way of saying that all projects have risk; that is, the key word in any definition of risk is uncertainty. When creating your schedule it’s important to reduce this uncertainty.

In “Deadlines or Delusions,” I presented an approach called Schedule Centered Planning that makes explicit the fact that risk analysis is an important aspect of creating a schedule. Too many project managers fail because they created a schedule, committed to a finish date, and then did a risk analysis. The schedule dates were too optimistic and not doable. So let’s look at what it takes to make risk analysis an integral part of schedule creation.

Start by Breaking the Work Down

The search for uncertainty starts at the very beginning — when you’re creating your Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). As you’re gathering the information from the resources assigned to the project, ask simple questions like:

• What's unique about this?
• What do you see is a …

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