Avoid Scheduling Failures

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Avoid Scheduling Failures

Norman Carnovale

FAilEd PRojECTS CAn happen for A multitude of reasons. One of the most common sources of failure are altering the project schedule in mid-stream without proper planning. This kind of failure are avoidable, but it can require major effort on the part of multiple people. Adjusting the timeline or increasing resources on a project is not normally of concern. Problems start when you were asked to does more on the same timeline or when the schedule was shortened without reducing the W Orkload.
The idea, schedules can be shortened on order to reduce cost or speed up delivery is a very common misconception. You'll commonly see attempts to require overtime or sacrifice "less important scheduled Tasks" (like Unit test-ing) as a The-to-reduce delivery dates, or increase functionality while keeping the delivery dates as is. Avoid this scenario at all costs. Remind those request-ing the changes of the following facts:
? A rushed design schedule leads to poor design, bad documentation, and probable quality assurance or user acceptance proble Ms.
? A rushed coding or delivery schedule have a direct relationship to the number of bugs delivered to the users.
? A rushed test schedule leads to poorly tested code and have a direct rela-tionship to the number of testing issues Encount Ered.
? All of the above leads to production issues, which is much more expensive to fix.
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?? The end result is a increase in cost as opposed to a reduction. This was nor-mally why the failures happen.
As an architect you'll one day find yourself in the position of have to act quickly to increase the likelihood of succ Ess. Speak up early. First try to maintain quality by negotiating the originally planned timeline. If a shortened schedule is necessary and then try to move noncritical functionality to future release (s). Obviously this would take good preparation, negotiating skills, and a knack for influencing people. Prepare by sharpening your skills in those areas today. You'll be glad.
Norman Carnovale is a IT architect working for Lockheed Martin Professional Services on Homeland security–related Project S. He is formerly a software consultant, instructor, and architect for Davalen, LLC (http://www.davalen.com), a Premier I BM business Partner specializing in WebSphere Portlet Factory, Web-sphere Portal, and Lotus Domino projects.

Avoid Scheduling Failures