Team is continuously facing some challenges in finishing the work as per the timelines. Poor impact analysis is one of the biggest reason behind this. Estimations are absolutely correct as per the scope of work and also there are no CRs. So, what could be other issues? Saving Changes...
Denise CantyAgile Coach, Life Coach, Author, Senior Project-Program Manager| Cenden CompanyWashington, Dc, United States
Is the team involved in the estimation process?
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2 replies by Eric Simms and Sonali Malu
Apr 30, 2017 7:37 AM
Eric Simms
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I'm looking forward to seeing the answer to Denise's question. One of my greatest irritants as a PM is watching a Manager or anyone else not performing the actual work (and who usually has never performed the work) make authoritative pronouncements of how long the work 'should' take.
May 01, 2017 5:37 AM
Sonali Malu
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Yes, the team is involved in estimation process.
Saving Changes...
Nasrullah MohammedPortfolio Manager| Advanced Electronics CompanyRiyadh, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Sonali - We often set goals that are too ambitious – and don’t think about all the challenges along the way. Some suggestions to create better deadlines, we all shall be able to achieve:
- Create realistic deadlines by thinking through all the steps and challenges involved.
- Create deadlines with consequences and rewards.
- Get others involved to hold you accountable to your deadlines. Saving Changes...
Yasser AlkhateebProject manager| Diyar UnitedKuwait, Kuwait, Kuwait
Sometimes team members are experiencing some personal or work problems and difficulties that would affect their performance and subsequently progressing their task inefficiently and not as planned. The project manager needs to continually monitor the performing team and communicate frequently with them trying to address any issues and try to help solving their problems if possible.
One of major reasons for team members' failure to meet deadlines might be an optimistic estimation for productivities of team members. Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
"estimations are absolutely correct as per the scope of work", what does mean? Estimations have an amount of uncertainty that usually are traduced into risk. Take a look to Barry Bohem`s Cone of Uncertainty that was created for software but has been taken for other industries and mainly by the PMI to understand the deviation into the estimations depending on the project life cycle phase you are. Saving Changes...
Drew CraigSr. Agile & Product Coach| VanguardPhiladelphia, Pa, United States
I had a similar thought to Sergio. Estimations are just that, estimations. Also, you mention scope management. If no CR's are created, how are the changes analyzed, estimated, approved, etc? Scope creep will certainly break the estimations and schedule.
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1 reply by Sonali Malu
May 01, 2017 5:43 AM
Sonali Malu
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Hi Andrew, there is no scope creep. CRs are not created means CRs are not raised at all. So, team is actually working on the defined scope of work only.
Saving Changes...
Eric SimmsSenior Program ManagerBaltimore, Maryland, United States
Apr 29, 2017 7:22 PM
Replying to Denise Canty
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Is the team involved in the estimation process?
I'm looking forward to seeing the answer to Denise's question. One of my greatest irritants as a PM is watching a Manager or anyone else not performing the actual work (and who usually has never performed the work) make authoritative pronouncements of how long the work 'should' take.
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1 reply by Sonali Malu
May 01, 2017 5:38 AM
Sonali Malu
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Hi Eric, the team is involved in estimation. I also tried re-validating the estimates with the team as I have seen work is expanding. But, team is sure that the estimates are correct and still not able to finish the work as per the estimation.
It is clear that estimations are just that, estimations and there is no such thing as accurate estimations. Correct estimations in my opinion means that the estimations were made by the people who are best qualified to make them, the estimators had all the variables needed to produce the estimations ( usually this is rarely the case) and no other people altered them.
But even when the estimations are "correct" there is no guarantee that the work will be finished on time. Why? Well because it is simply impossible to produce accurate estimations. :P
The type of work that needs to be performed also plays a huge role on the accuracy of the estimations. Estimating how long will it take to dig a trench is much easier than estimating how long a certain software development task would take to complete but in both cases the dead-lines can be missed.
In general when the work that needs to be performed is creative in nature it is much harder to produce good estimations. You may have ideal conditions from a project management point of view, including the best qualified SMEs, and you can still miss deadlines if your technical experts take technical decisions that prove to add extra work.
Once I had to work on a very complex software developing task which I managed to finish in the time I estimated but during testing some problems had been discovered. Those problems proved major deficiencies in my work that were too complicated to fix on the current design. So by the time the task should have been completed I had actually started to work on it from scratch throwing away all my existing work.
If something like this happens then as a PM there is no much thing you can do to ensure the work is completed on time. Saving Changes...
Deepesh RammoorthyICT Project Manager ( PMP®AgilePM®Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®))| Australian Red Cross Blood ServiceTarneit, Vic, Australia
Often it's the cost of conformance relating to the Quality Management on your software. This includes :-
1) Time taken to develop the software
2) Tools /Equipment available to develop the software
3) Testing
4) Documentation and processes
5) Training
Maybe some members require Training to improve their efficiency, some people are following documentation differently , perhaps testing could be more streamlined, perhaps the team is not focusing on building quality on the product , rather focusing on more testing
Note that the later, the defect is found in the software, the more time it takes to fix it .
Does the team follow Pair programming? Do they undergo formal code inspections? Is the tester working together with the developer and BA as a cohesive team? Is there a bottleneck in the process which is preventing some tasks to be undertaken in parallel ? Think of Critical Chain tasks .
Think Process Improvement Plan , which is an output of Plan Quality Management as per the Quality Management Knowledge area. Can that be tweaked? Think of OPAs and Lessons Learnt? What happened that caused a delay in a similar project last time?
can you use Cause and Effect Diagram? Can you use Flowcharting ? Can you use Pareto and Checksheets to find out the "Vital few" thats causing all the issues? Saving Changes...
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
