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"Student Syndrome" gives a name to this problem, meaning that serious effort on a task doesn't tend to happen until the deadline is close. Most of us are familiar with the term paper we had months to write. Goldratt comes up with four forces that conspire to make projects done on time or late: Student Syndrome, Gold-Plating, Multi-Tasking, and other dependent tasks. If tasks really are only on time or late, a project estimated conservatively is going to involve a lot of waste. Note that there is a huge difference between a confident estimate and an average one. Likewise, when people warn that an estimate is aggressive, take note.) ("Is that a conservative estimate?" is a good question to ask. No matter how your project is organized, when you gather estimates, you can use these terms to measure stress and project schedule risk. Thus, a 10% estimate might be "aggressive," a 50 percent estimate might be "average," 90% "conservative," and so on. The area under the curve represents the total percentage change the task will be done in that time period. Once we reach our most likely time, we begin a long, slow, trailing curve at the end. When we hit some minimum possible time, we see a line emerge, which ticks upward in probability as time increases. There is no chance the work will be done in an hour or two.
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Many tasks have this sort of a breakdown. The reality is that the task has some sort of probability distribution, as illustrated in the chart below:
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Giving different numbers doesn't change the work to be done, nor the ability of the person doing the work it just allows us to make different plans. On the other hand, under pressure, we may want to give a shorter estimate. Notice that the estimator needs to make some tradeoff between efficiency (get the task done quickly) and confidence (knowing it will really be done on time.) Most of the time, if the deadline is important, we want to pad our estimate, offering a task schedule that is longer. In order to come up with that “given date,” someone has to estimate the work- ideally the person who is assigned to that work. (Larger projects will include things like work in parallel and slack.). That's a simplified definition but it's good enough for our purposes. The set of things that must be done in order from beginning to end is called the "critical path," with the idea being that if any one of those tasks is delayed a single day, the entire project is off a day. To organize the project, you collect estimates for each task, string them together to fit, come up with an end date, and monitor and control performance. In this view, a project is successful if it hits four goals: On time, on budget, feature-complete, and high quality (or "few defects"). "A project is a collection of dependent tasks, coordinated to provide a complete deliverable on a given day." Once we understand that, we'll cover the critical chain fix in a bit more depth, followed by how you can use this tool. To understand the solution, we first have to understand the problem: How a classically organized project can wind up in this situation. How many of them were early? How many on time? How many late? If early projects are the exception and late projects happen at least occasionally, critical chain might be for you. Take a moment to think about your last handful of projects. Instead, it fixes a certain kind of problem-projects where (a) tasks are never completed early they are always on time or later, thus (b) projects are always be on time or late. This approach is not for every team, or for every project. It does this by having very aggressive estimates, then using that “saved” time at the end of the project to protect project results, not the result of any individual task. What is Critical Chain?Ĭritical chain prescribes a different way to organize your projects, focusing on protecting the results for the entire project over individual tasks. In this article I provide a different tool for your toolbox - an entirely different way of conceptualizing project work called critical chain project management. In previous installments of this series, I covered ethical ways to gain influence and use negotiation skills. What Keeps Project Managers from Managing Their Projects