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A Prescription for Redefining Your Project's Success
by Adele Sommers
At the beginning of a project, it's difficult to know whether or how it might become derailed along the way. What should you do when, despite your team's very best efforts, you find that you won't even come close to meeting the original schedule?
Imagine this: It's two weeks before the deadline. But your
project is at least six weeks behind! Everyone is sweating
bullets. As the project leader, you're wringing your hands.
A volcano of surprises has erupted since the project
launched three months ago. And in
contrast to everyone's prognostications, no one foresaw
the lava flow of trouble ahead.
 Your dilemma: Information that was supposed
to be available in Week 2 won't be known for another
month. Parts of a system that were designed to work
one way are really working another. An expert you needed
to provide critical details went on extended leave right
after the project launch. And that's just scratching
the surface!
So today, that simple-looking undertaking that
your crystal ball said should only take four weeks of
work beckons from a distant horizon. The funding may
soon be cut off. And management will surely panic if
it's not finished for the scheduled unveiling.
You sense disaster looming, yet everyone feels helpless. So, what can you do?
This article explains why schedules derail, and how to redefine "project success" to restore sanity to your endeavor.
It may be time to regroup and swiftly chart a new course.
How Did the Project Get So Far Off Course?
Well, initially, you either defined or received a set of
requirements for completing the project. There are four types of criteria involved in the "project diamond," below (some of which
may have been implied rather than stated):
* Time (the speed or schedule for doing the
work)
* Costs (in terms of the funding, the resources,
or a combination)
* Quality (how well the effort needed to be done)
* Features (how many components or deliverables
there were, and how complex)
 It's not unusual for project
sponsors or clients to ask for:
1)
Low cost and
2) Fast completion and
3) High quality and
4) Many features in the final project deliverables.
Although
it's understandable to want the greatest value
for the funding, usually it's possible to
achieve only two or three out of four of these
goals on a typical project. If both the budget and schedule are fixed, the tradeoffs would have to limit the quality, constrain
the features, or both.
But if your sponsors or clients asked for everything under the sun, and you agreed to deliver it without weighing the options, your project is at risk!
Further, People Chronically Underestimate Their Time and Effort
People typically have a difficult
time deriving realistic project estimates. Given the
number of project unknowns, coming up with accurate
predictions can be tricky. (Smart project managers know
this and frequently add buffers derived from records
of actual past experience, commonly known as "fudge
factors," to estimates.)
 If someone scoped the project schedule without basing it on historical data, or without asking performers familiar with the work to estimate it themselves, the schedule could be significantly underestimated -- by a factor of 2 or more, for example, where it might ultimately take twice as long to complete the work.
And on this project, you've run into
a common situation in which the features (and
perhaps quality) have collided with time -- there's too much to get done on too short a schedule.
But Wait! Couldn't You Try a Last-Minute,
Heroic Maneuver?
 Well, you could, but should you? Yes,
it's only human nature to want to pull out all the stops,
work 24/7, and pray it will all come together.
Is it
still possible to finish on time if you speed up your
efforts, put more people on the project, and/or require
the team to work 14 hours a day? And if you do, can
you ever get completely caught up?
Let's be honest. You will probably
need to recognize that there's no way to achieve the original
goals in the expected time frame. There are just too
many loose ends. Key people and information sources
are missing, and
parts of the system aren't working correctly, with no fix in sight.
A misconception about projects is that you can
remedy every delay by adding people or increasing
effort. In certain cases, you can. In others, adding
people at the eleventh hour -- or working at a frenzied
pace -- merely causes chaos, frustration, and errors.
Not only that, but if the pacing factor is something beyond the team's control -- such as the limited availability of certain key players or resources -- then the whole schedule might need to be rearranged to accommodate those constraints.
It's Time to Write a New Prescription for Your Project's Success
 The dilemma is
that your team won't be able to complete everything that was requested per the original schedule. The answer may be to re-plan the
end of the project so you can smoothly carry over
the unfinished tasks to a later phase, or stagger their delivery. In fact, the earlier you can anticipate
any potential need to do this on your project, the more
the team and sponsors will benefit.
Here is a simple but effective strategy for
applying this sanity-saving approach:
1) Review all outstanding
tasks and requirements, and then sort the tasks into these categories:
- "Must-have" within the remaining
schedule, as they'll be needed very soon
- "Nice-to-have" within the remaining
schedule, but they could be carried over
- Can't do yet, even if you wanted to, because you need more information
2) Also, the sponsors might consider having you deliver the results:
- In phases, just in time for when they will be needed
- As a series of a prototypes to be tested first and then refined later
In conclusion, try reviewing these ideas with your team, project sponsors, and management. Develop a plan
and make any refinements needed. If you redefine success and execute your plan
accordingly, you'll sleep soundly again at night!
Copyright 2007 Adele Sommers
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Wouldn't it be grand if all we needed to do was gaze into our crystal balls to find out how our projects would turn out in the end? Will we wind up with enough time, budget, resources, and so forth, to fulfill all of the ambitious goals that we envisioned at the start? 
That means that at one time or another, we are all struck by "Murphy's Law," a maxim that implies that whatever can go wrong will go wrong -- especially on complex projects. 
