'Is This Delay a Problem?'
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
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Topics: New Practitioners, Risk Management, Schedule Management, Scheduling
It doesn’t take very long for new project managers to learn that things don’t always go according to plan. One of the first examples that a new PM is likely to encounter is a schedule delay on a task. It’s important to understand those delays, and to recognize that they aren’t all created equal. But when should a PM just let a delay go without worrying, and when should they be aggressive to address the problem?
The easy answer is to say that if a task is on or close to the critical path, then it needs to be dealt with more quickly—and with more decisiveness—than if it is something a long way removed from that critical path.
That’s not wrong, but it’s not enough. There may be two tasks on the critical path that are both experiencing a delay of a few days that need to be treated very differently.
What is a delay?
To explore that, let’s consider what a delay is. That might sound obvious, but it’s not simply that a task has taken longer than planned. If that’s happened, it’s already too late to do something about it. We need to be more proactive than that and identify delays that are in progress or upcoming. As a simple example, if a five-day task is only 10% complete after the first two days, then it is experiencing a delay—it’s behind schedule.
Or at least, it appears to be. It’…
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