I’ve been crazy busy.
I’ve missed at least two #follow friday on Twitter. Not a good state of affairs for blog chick.
However – I’m learning a lot, working for the first time with a 5 year integrated master schedule. I think that the IMS/IMP is not as hard as I thought it was. I think that if you’ve read the PMBOK, all the steps are there and that the IMS/IMP development is a flavor of this basic sequenece:
- Define Scope
- Create WBS
- Define Activities
- Sequence Activities
- Estimate Activity Resources
- Estimate Activity Durations
- Develop Schedule
I think where most projects fail is this: Project Managers try to build the schedule without spending the time to get down to the nitty gritty of neat, definable and measurable units of work. This rings true regardless of methodology, agile, scrum or iterative. In fact, scrum is all about getting real about the activities first, before you think about who does what when.
When they built St. Paul’s Cathedral, it was the same set of processes, when they built the Eiffel Tower, it was the same set of processes, when they developed the Hubble Telescope it was the same set of processes, and I bet when Google built their search algorithm it wasn’t a hap hazard, hey let’s do the schedule and then figure out the work type of thing. Nope, the most probably used the same sequence.
So this is just a friendly reminder to get back to basics. One of the things I like about Glen Alleman is that he is always bringing it back to basics, re-interating and clarifying theory, because, really, winning in the creation of a good project is simple, just follow the process.
Glen’s presentation on the Performance Measurements Baselines (don’t be scared by the title) really breaks down the components of developing a great schedule. This is something anyone can pick up and understand and is a great refresher for Project Managers. Take the time to read through, you’ll be glad you did.
One cool thing to note – Check out slide 19. He suggests that once you’ve defined your work, you can assign an indicator of the confidence you have in the duration estimate and the effort estimate. With these assigned values, you can then add them together to pull out areas of higher risk. If you have low confidence in the duration estimate and the effort estimate, that’s something to keep monitoring.
Happy Scheduling Trails to you!
