5 RISKS TO PROJECT SCHEDULE

Project managers rely on their schedules. The Project Schedule is the one document that tells everyone what they should be doing, when it needs to start and how long it should take. It is also used to track progress, so managing a project without a schedule is virtually impossible if you want to achieve the agreed milestones and delivery dates. However good we think our schedules are, there are always risks when it comes to managing tasks, resources and the project scope. Here are 5 scheduling risks that you could be facing – how will you manage these on your project?

1. Not Scheduling Vacations

Is anyone taking an annual vacation this year? Yes? Well, are those dates incorporated into your project schedule? It can be difficult to get this information from your project team members, especially if they don’t work directly for you, but the best thing to do is to bring it up during one of your regular team meetings. Use your normal team collaboration approaches to check the dates of everyone’s planned annual leave (including your own). Then you can incorporate this downtime into the schedule. If you don’t, there is a risk that you’ll be allocating tasks to team members when they aren't even in the country. This will delay the project overall and it could inconvenience other teams and departments that are waiting for those tasks to be completed.

2. Scheduling Everyone At 100%

Everyone is dedicated to your project and gives it their all, right? Wrong, but not for the reasons you might think! Even the most dedicated project team member won’t spend 100% of their day – 7 or 8 hours – working on your project. They go and buy a sandwich, they talk to a colleague they haven’t seen for ages, they have a doctor’s appointment… The list of things to fill up a day with (that aren't your project) is huge.

The risk here is that your schedule will suffer delays as tasks take longer in reality than you planned. The best way to handle this is to make sure that you only schedule project team resources at 80% capacity. You can do this every day by limiting the amount of hours of tasks they have to do, but it is probably easier to do it by week. Everyone’s availability per week then only becomes 4 days out of 5.

If you report or update your schedule on a weekly basis this should be manageable. If you do update your schedule more regularly than this you may have to look at scheduling on a daily or hourly basis instead.

3. Forgetting Tasks

Ideally, your project schedule should include absolutely everything from the very first day that you commit your thoughts to your online project management tool. Unfortunately, it is rare that project teams have that much clarity about project tasks, and there is normally something that has been forgotten!

Small tasks may be able to be accommodated without many issues, but if you have left out something major – well, that’s a different problem.

There’s a risk that uncovering a large task that has been missed delays your schedule to the point where you can’t achieve the published deadlines. Then you’ll have to submit a change request to your project sponsor and ask for the end date to be officially moved.

Build in a mechanism or process to deal with forgotten tasks and remember to review your schedule regularly with your team. This will at least ensure that you have the time to discuss any extra tasks with your team members, so there is less likelihood of tasks being overlooked.

4. Inaccurate Estimates

If you are doing something for the first time it can be difficult to work out exactly how long tasks will take. Even subject matter experts may not know, even if they have done something similar before.

Projects are generally unique and anything with a bit of innovative thinking may require you to plan for tasks that have never been carried out in the company before, such as the launch of a new piece of software or a new product.

Inaccurate estimates can be a risk to your project schedule because they mean your milestones and end date can change dramatically. Normally the problem comes when the estimates are too low – not many project sponsors worry about delivering a project early!

5. Scope Creep

Scope creep is when unauthorized changes slip through and make it into the project scope. This results in the team doing more work than originally planned. Scope creep normally happens when a key stakeholder puts forward a request to change something and this does not, for whatever reason, go through the change management process.

Over-enthusiastic sponsors are often the culprit! They ask for changes without necessarily understanding the full implications for the schedule, resource plan or budget, and yet the team has to make the change. The risk here is that the overall project schedule slips. Critical tasks may not get completed on time as team members are working on new changes, and that can create delays that you might not be able to make up.

The best way to avoid the risk of scope creep is to ensure that all changes go through the approved change management process. A good project schedule is the foundation for any project, and the project manager should make sure that it is as accurate as possible. All projects face risks, and risks to your schedule are no different.