1. DILBERT Scott Adams
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

2. DILBERT Scott Adams
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

3. DILBERT Scott Adams
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

4. Hope is our most important strategy
“ … they had never done a project like this before… it was bigger, different programming language, new platform, shorter schedule.”
What to do:
Identify risks!
Iterate, prototypes, ongoing “proof of concepts” tasks
Hudson Bay tasks
Train
Iterate everything… especially planning & scheduling
Get help
Milestones (inch-pebbles) with deliverables
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

5. Chapter 6 Recognizing & Avoiding Schedule Games
Management Games
Bring me a rock
Hope is our most important strategy
Queen of Denial
Sweep under the rug
Happy date
Pants on fire
Split focus
Schedule equals commitment
We’ll know where we are when we get there
The schedule tool is always right
We gotta have it, we’re toast without it
We can’t say no
Team member games:
Schedule chicken
90% done
We’ll go faster now
Schedule trance
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

6. Queen of Denial Inability to face reality. The “ostrich effect”
Advice:
Find out why
Do risk analysis
Make iterations are your friend
“solution space domain expertise” essential
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

7. Sweep under the rug Unable to face and deal with problems
Like, what went wrong
Avoidance measures:
Rank features for each release
Implement by feature
Develop release criteria at the beginning
Make stuff visible for folks to see
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

8. Happy Date Management demands a date, and all agree
without any thought!
Associated with a culture of not discussing difficult topics …
Avoidance:
Explain schedule ranges
Iterate … explain what is to be delivered within each range
Short timeboxes
Use inch-pebbles… velocity charts
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

9. Pants on fire “Stop working on that, do this!”
Represents “no focus” “no priorities” “no…”
Wastes time!
What to do:
Short timebox iterations, start something new at the end.
… or implement by feature
Communicate costs of context switching
Modify your estimation approach… or else!
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

10. Split focus
“50% on Project A, 30% on Project B, 20% on Project C and your spare time on…”
What to do:
Have the team work on the problem…
Move to one-week iterations … with release criteria
Communicate the costs
Set priorities… finish something
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

11. Schedule equals Commitment
No… it’s a guess not a prediction!
The prediction is based on caring about:
1. What is delivered
2. How good is the product
Don’t just commit!
“If the people involved are not ready to discuss the schedule, the feature set and the defect levels, then any discussion of schedule being a commitment is premature.”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

12. We’ll know where we are when we get there
No! “… keeping focused on its (the project’s) goal(s) is the best way to finish a project”
Notes:
Have a project vision, goals and release criteria
If the boss has no vision, you define it!
If the project is too long… iterations.
P.S. “If they don’t listen, or can’t stop their behavior, remember you don’t have to stay there.”
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

13. The schedule tool is always right…
Remember, the schedule is a guess about how things might happen!
“The Gantt Chart lulls people into believing the schedule and not checking on reality.”
Alternatives:
Use Rolling wave scheduling
Use low-tech scheduling techniques
Give estimates with confidence limits
Use timeboxed iterations
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

14. We gotta have it – We’re toast without it!
Without discussing trade-offs?
Alternatives:
Negotiate for a different feature set
Negotiate for more time
Negotiate for more money
Move to timeboxed iterations to manage the demand…
GAMES TEAM MEMBERS PLAY
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

15. We can’t say no Blind acceptance of “just fit one more feature into …
How to combat the “just say yes” problem:
Have team create plan that includes the new feature
Monitor the overtime… timebox it and evaluate results versus a non-overtime week
We’ll just add more people.
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

16. Wait for another team member to confess!
Schedule Chicken
Wait for another team member to confess!
Options:
No serial status meetings!
Smaller tasks with daily deliverables… so you can see
Implement by feature… there’s something to show
Short iterations… so you don’t need the weekly serial meeting
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

17. 90% Done 90% done with 90% of the work yet to do! “90% done” happens!
What might help – have team member:
Develop inch-pebble scheduling
Make status visible
Provide coaching on how to track their estimate
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

18. We’ll go faster now Feature implementation stalls…
Team still remains optimistic
Advice:
Show the velocity data on features implemented
Track changes to your initial estimates
Measure everything team is doing – to keep team focused on necessary, date-scheduled tasks
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman

19. “Team is in a trance about the date.”
Schedule trance
“Team is in a trance about the date.”
Options for inserting reality:
Use iterations!
The shorter the better
The goal
Completed work on the feature(s)
Development, documentation, testing, etc.
Maintain focus within each iteration
Daily standup meetings
Implement by feature!
Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management. Johanna Rothman