Scheduling software projects

Careful assessment, specification and estimation of project contents, context and constraints helps to create a feasible and sensible schedule for software project. While in some cases this means a lot of trivial, routine work, such as writing documentation or creating Gantt charts, often the most useful outcome from the scheduling exercise is the increased awareness of issues affecting the project. By forcing oneself to create a schedule that can be defended in a tough situation requires a lot of thinking, a lot of reasoning behind the decisions made. Creating the schedule itself is often trivial, but being able to do a great schedule is really hard work.

Software projects are unique by definition. This means that when we are planning a project it is very difficult to understand every aspect and every activity it takes to complete it. There will be changes. There will be surprises. There are issues that we know should be there, but we simply don't know what they really are. Planning for contingencies, adding buffer, managing risks is important. Managing expectations of various stakeholders is equally important.

Furthermore, just having a schedule does not add much value. Only a schedule, that is made visible to all relevant parties, that is monitored, and that is updated when needed, is really valuable. Creating a schedule, and never visiting it again during the project, is waste. The key to imperfection and inefficiency is to embrace waste, the key to better projects is to eliminate waste. If you don't want to monitor and maintain the schedule, why would you want to spend time creating one?

There are relatively few things project manager can do to control and steer the project directly. This doesn't mean that project manager doesn't matter. Understanding and acknowledging the situation the project has is the starting point for changing course. Analyzing, visualizing and discussing the situation to all stakeholders will help the project manager to make them committed to the change. At least they are aware of the situation, and the potential consequences.