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Categories: Scheduling
Is anyone else feeling like reality has set in for 2026? Annual goals are set, budgets are approved and that sense of ‘completion’ that you get at the end of the year has well and truly worn off. All the strategic objectives are in place and we know what we should be achieving in the remaining 11 months.
If your project ran across year end and is continuing into this year, then this is your reality check – how much has changed and are you still working from a plan that made sense last year but no longer cuts it? Here are 7 signs that your project plan is stuck in 2025.
1. Dates that assume uninterrupted focus
I know I’ve been guilty of this in the past – scheduling resources assuming they can dedicate 100% of their time to the project. And let’s put aside the fact that most people don’t have 100% of their working day to give, by the time you’ve taken out team meetings, non-project tasks, sickness, holidays and even bathroom breaks through a day.Look at the planned dates again in light of what vacation time people have booked for this year and check you can still hit your milestones.
2. Risks that haven’t been touched since approval
Time to dust off the risk register and see which ones are relevant to your project schedule. The plan might not work if some of those risks have either materialised into issues or look a bit more impactful this year. 3. Stakeholders who’ve changed role but not responsibility
Who in your stakeholder community has changed role so they shouldn’t be supporting the project any longer… and yet they still are? Time to check in with them and find out who should be holding the reins now they have moved on.4. Dependencies that are “assumed” rather than confirmed
Again, something else I’ve done in the past – and I’m sure you know of projects where assumed dependencies have caused problems. Talk to the project teams or business leaders where your dependencies sit and check in with them. They need to know the impact of their work on yours.5. Decisions parked “until later”
How many decisions got kicked into the long grass at the end of last year? And have you got decisions on all of those now? Oftentimes, we end up with stakeholders needing a refresh of all the things that were discussed last year. This can make decisions take even longer as people remind themselves of what we thought we’d almost decided back in December.Get the right conversations in the calendar now so you can move forward.
6. Reporting that no longer reflects how work actually flows
Who are you reporting to about planned progress and do they still care? Check in with your senior stakeholders, make sure you haven’t missed any refreshed PMO processes that got reissued last month and ensure that you’re talking to the right people for reporting progress within the team itself.7. A plan no one refers to
Who is looking at the plan apart from you? If you’re the only person using it, that could be a sign that everyone else knows it’s no longer relevant – time for a meaningful update.So what do we do?
Your schedule probably isn’t that awful – certainly not needing a complete replan and rebaseline. A quick refresh is most likely going to fix all of these, and you can do that with the team. In fact, you can probably do a lot of it without the team, if you’re close to the detail (and that’s not something I would normally recommend).Updating the plan is something you’d do regularly anyway as a project manager, and it might just have been that the end of last year got away from you and you haven’t yet had time to put things right on the schedule. Now is the time to do that, before the plan gets too far from reality.
Posted on: February 03, 2026 11:20 AM |
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