[TMMM] Ch 14 – Hatching a Catastrophe

<< Chapter 13: The Whole and the Parts

Milestones or Millstones

The first step to keeping a schedule is to actually have a schedule.

When designing a schedule, you’ll obviously need milestones.  The milestones must be concrete, specific, measurable events.  Don’t choose vague tasks like “coding” or “designing”, because coding is always 90% finished, and debugging is always 99% done.  Pick concrete milestones that are 100% events.  Ex. “debugged version of build passed all test cases”, or “specs signed by architect and implementers”

Notes:

1. Estimates of the length of an activity, made and revised carefully ever two weeks before the activity starts, do not significantly change as the start time draws near, no matter how wrong they ultimately turn out to be
2. During the activity, overestimates of duration come steadily down as the activity proceeds
3. Underestimates do not change significantly during the activity until about three weeks before the scheduled completion

“The Other Piece Is Late Anyway”

“Hustle” (think sports, not Jay-Z), provides cushion, reserve capacity, that enables a team to cope with routine mishaps, to anticipate and forfend mishaps.  PERT charts and critical-path scheduling help with this.  It shows where the critical paths are, and if slips occur, then the date must be moved.  More importantly, these tools lay out the networks and identify the dependencies.  It helps you find ways to make up for lost time in the other parts.

Under the Rug

When the first line manager detects a slippage, he won’t tell the boss because he will see it as his responsibility to “fix” the slippage and make up for lost time.  The problem is essentially “swept under the rug”.

The boss, on the other hand, needs 2 key pieces of information:

• exceptions to plan that require action
• a status picture for education

With the rug-sweeping that’s going on, this makes the boss’ job hard.  There are 2 ways to address this problem

Reduce role-conflict: The boss must distinguish between action information and status information.  The boss has to resist the urge to act on problems that his managers can solve on their own.  The boss should also never act on problems while he is reviewing the status reports.  If the manager knows that his boss will accept status reports without panic or preemption, the manager will tend to give more honest appraisals.

Yanking the Rug off: Have review techniques by which the true status is made known.  PERT charts with frequent, sharp milestones is a powerful tool.   By constantly checking, updating and revising this document, you can measure the status and check if milestones are met.