Planning for Reality Craig Letavec, PMP, PgMP, MSP Waynesville, Ohio, U.S.
It’s amazing how often software projects tend to fall into late, over-budget, off-quality situations. Even in highly touted software shops with international certifications and maturity assessments lining the walls, the trials of managing the very fluid environment of software development are many.
The pace of development will naturally vary throughout the life of the project. Sometimes you are ahead of schedule, sometimes behind. Often, project managers seek to control these fluctuations through strict, elaborate project timelines that lay out prescribed task assignments and deadlines. However, they find themselves making multiple revisions to the plan along the way to deal with the dynamic nature of creating software. While the development and execution of a detailed, keenly estimated project plan is important in the success of any project, many software project managers may find some benefit in adding some “reality time” into their plans. The critical chain method uses the concept of “buffers” as one means to deal with inherent variance over the life cycle of the project. Try introducing “buffer time” or “reality time” into your schedule at each phase of your software development life cycle (design, coding, testing, etc.). Buffer time allows for a degree of flexibility within a phase without the need to perform major scheduling adjustments. Think of this buffer time as a time contingency reserve for the phase. The process is fairly straightforward. Look at each phase of your project, consider the total duration of the phase based on your best planning, and then add a buffer task at the end of the phase that has a duration of a percentage of the total phase duration, say 10% or so.
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