How project planning correlates to project success.

1. Bill Zuppinger

2. A carelessly planned project will take three times
longer to complete than expected. A carefully
planned project will only take twice as long.

3.  Customer
 Cost
 Product
 Schedule

4.  The classic instruments of project management
(WBS, CPM) do not guarantee success. The
skills of people are more important to success
than the formalization of project management.
 60% of “successful” projects failed to meet the
triple constraint dimensions of time and/or budget.
Of the projects that did meet the triple constraint
targets, respondents perceived 15% of them to be
failures. (PMI, 2006).

5.  Receive RFQ
 Evaluate Scope, determine capability
 High level compliance matrix
 WBS: deliverables driven, structured
 Schedule: management to goals
◦ Milestone, deliverables driven
 Resources
 Risk Assessment
 Cost Estimate

6.  Is it more important to schedule your time to
efficiently solve problems created by conflicting
expectations…..or to take the time to work with
others to clarify expectations up front?

7.  Is it more important to spend time trying to solve
problems created by the lack of
communication….or to build the relationships that
make effective communications possible?
 Communication is built on trust…
◦ Less concerned about who is right than what is right.

8.  “I project manager, do solemnly swear, or affirm,
that I will manage the authorized work, the whole
authorized work, and nothing but the authorized
work, or so help me project sponsor.”
 The PM conflict: we want to deliver the minimum
amount required as stated in the original
commitment, whereas the customer would seek
the maximum amount desired up to the point at
which doing more reduces our profit.

9.  “Projects that skimp on upstream activities
typically have to do the same work downstream at
anywhere from 10 to 100 times the cost of doing it
properly in the first place (Fagan 1976, Boehm
and Papaccio 1988).”

10.  Scope change: authorized change
 Scope creep: inclusion of unauthorized work
 Scope change/creep is a barrier to project
success. It results in conflict.
◦ 60% correlation to project failure (Lechler, 2006).

11.  PM’s need to first identify what needs to be
managed before they create a plan to manage it.
 Tasks in the WBS must add value to the
authorized deliverables. The completion of a
scheduled task should cause the deliverable.
 Tasks that will use scarce and costly resources
should create deliverables in the plan.

12.  A CPM schedule seeks to finish each critical path task
on time by adding unnecessary safety into the
schedule as protection against any task being late.
 CPM sends a false signal that any task with 0 slack is
important
 Work is estimated to provide 90% confidence in
meeting completion date.
 The Critical path will vary during the project as soon
as progress is entered into the schedule.
 The reliance on the determination of slack to focus
attention on keeping commitments exacerbates
conflict.

13.  The incorrect use of sequencing dependencies,
date constraints, task types, milestones all
contribute to create schedules that are unstable,
inaccurate, and not reliable during project
execution.
 Project teams detest weekly progress reporting
because it so vividly manifests their lack of
progress.

14.  Manage to milestones that are well defined
 Manage constraints
 Micromanagement is an unintended consequence
of too much decomposition when seeking to divide
and conquer a complex effort.
◦ Do not schedule tasks that are to small or too
insignificant for the project manager to schedule in a
network diagram

15.  Instead of striving to achieve zero variance from
the baseline, PM’s seek to achieve a favorable
variance from the baseline. To achieve favorable
variance intentionally, most project plans must
include things that project teams do not really
intend to execute.
 CPM uses slack as localized protection. You
need more protection with slack than you would
need using buffers.

16.  Projects progress rapidly until they are 90 percent
complete. Then they remain 90 percent complete
forever.

17.  Unless a resource pool (RBS) has an
unconstrained capacity, it will limit the amount of
work that the project can complete within a finite
duration.

18.  Manage acceptable variation
 Avoid unacceptable variation