Managing Padding in Time Estimates

Posted by Mike Ramm on September 14, 2007

Estimating time is one of the most difficult and most unsure activities during the planning phase of the project management process. We had a discussion recently with some colleagues of mine about the extra time that sometimes the developers or the project managers add to their estimates, called padding.

There are two extremes about this approach. On the one side is the management’s urge to shorten the project’s duration leading to unrealistically short schedules. Sometimes the developers (usually younger and inexperienced ones) get infected by the flowing optimism and make unrealistic estimates, which you know are impossible to meet. Then, when you make the final schedule you add some percentage of time (usually between 10% and 20%) to make sure that even after the management shortens your schedule you will still have the necessary time to complete the project on time.

Tags: padding, planning, task management, time estimate
Filed Under Project Management, Teamwork | 3 Comments

Project Management and Hiking

Posted by Mike Ramm on August 26, 2007

Hiker Glen Alleman wrote a great post in his blog Herding Cats entitled Agile Planning. There he makes an interesting comparison between the hiking “projects” and software ones and asks serious questions to the adherents of the Agile methodologies.

He says:

Hiking requires Planning and Scheduling and Execution. Alternative plans are needed, alternative schedules always happen and alternative execution choices are always there. So what’s all the noise about Planning and Scheduling in agile software development?

And more:

Preparation is the key to a successful hike

Why wouldn’t…
Preparation be the key to success for a project?

To argue otherwise - that planning, preparation, sequencing, and execution performance management - is not needed is dangerous in the hiking paradigm. Why do we think these activities are not important in the project management paradigm?

Good questions to ask ourselves and especially those religious fanatics who claim that their extreme approach with no planning is always a better solution than the traditional management methodologies.

Read the whole article he re.

Tags: hiking, planning, Project Management
Filed Under Project Management, Software Development | Leave a Comment