5 Principles for Creating Good Project Reserves

Joanna is a manager, advisor and business trainer with 10+ years of experience. She assists organizations in the process of development and building their maturity, in implementing strategies, improving management and driving change.

  Scope Management  

In an ideal world, a team member provides all the products to a project manager a few days before the deadline: "You will have more time to test them, and I to fix them," they would declare with a smile. Tests would stop at the first attempt, because the team member is a perfect employee.

So much for the dream world. In the less ideal but better-known world we live in, the expert sends half of the contracted work over on the day after the deadline—wriggling when asked where the rest is, and sulking when asked whether they checked the materials. At the same time (if the PM is lucky), a sponsor is calling and throwing a tantrum. The unlucky PM starts to count how many kidneys must be sold to pay for contractual penalties, and these may be severe (how much is $1.5 million in kidneys?).

If the PM is good, she has these calculations in memory. If she is really good, she doesn’t have to because there is a provision and the delay just means there will be less time for tests, and the bars in the Gantt chart won’t cross like chromosomes in a genetics exercises.

Managing while creating reserves is both a habit and an art. It helps to follow five useful principles:

1. Create them in everything. On time and schedule. Budget and rates. Workdays and the number of experts in a project team. In micro scale (mentally adding 10% to expected meeting …

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