Warning Signs that Your Project Schedule Isn't Feasible

As a project manager, you must be able to recognize that your project schedule isn’t feasible. That way, you can proactively address issues, mitigate risks, and increase the likelihood of project success. Here are common warning signs that your project schedule needs work.

• Building and sharing a schedule before scope definition is stable. When project objectives and scope are still in flux, a schedule is nothing more than a rough guess. Teams may be anxious to get to work, but it’s too soon to share a schedule if scope continues to change. This schedule will mislead people about when deliverables will be available. It also makes life miserable for the managers who allocate people to the project, because they have to replan staffing for the viable schedule when it’s available. Best practice: Ensure your scope is stable before distributing a schedule.
• The schedule depends on heavy workloads. Team members often juggle multiple tasks on a project. And many have day-to-day business support responsibilities that aren’t tracked by the project. This combination can produce an excessive workload for a team member, which leads to burnout, decreased productivity, and increased risk of errors. Best practice: Understand the percentage of time each team member can dedicate to the project and schedule accordingly.
• The schedule doesn’t consider competing priorities. The most critical project team members often deal with competing priorities (in addition to day-to-day bustiness duties), such as working on other projects, resolving business issues, reviewing project change requests, and taking on work delegated from their managers. These other duties take time and can affect the person’s availability on your project. Talk through what your crucial team members do in the organization and allocate their time to project tasks with this in mind.
• The schedule was built on unrealistic estimates. Overly optimistic estimates plague a lot of project schedules, which means trouble. The uniqueness of project work makes it difficult to estimate. Plus, people might not be trained on estimation techniques. One way to improve estimates is to use PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) estimation. Estimators provide three estimates for a task: optimistic (O), most likely (ML), and pessimistic (P). People don’t pull these numbers out of the air. They think about the work and consider what might happen (good and bad. This analysis improves the accuracy of the estimate. The typical formula for calculating PERT estimates is: (O+(4*ML)+P)/6.
• Note: There is another way to improve estimates. Get into the habit of comparing final actual effort to your original estimates. These comparisons help project team members understand what happens in projects and how much effort different types of tasks take.
• Stakeholder managers don’t buy into the schedule. Managers who allocate their people to a project have a big impact on the project schedule. If managers don’t think the schedule is realistic, they aren’t likely to allocate their people to work on the project. Review your project schedule with the managers whose people are needed for the project. Make sure they have bought into the schedule and the project outcomes.

Have your schedules suffered from gotchas I haven’t mentioned? Do you regularly look for other warning signs on your schedules? If so, share with us in the comments section.

For more about project scheduling, check out my Project Management Foundations: Schedules course.

Coming Up

Marlene Chism is an expert in conflict, anger management, working with difficult people, and having difficult conversations – things most of us want to avoid. Despite the tough topics, she’s a truly lovely person. In this LinkedIn Learning Office Hours , we’re going to dig into some of the concepts she teaches for dealing with conflict. We’ll spend the rest of the session providing practical advice for dealing with conflict and other difficult situations. Bring your questions about the conflict you need help with, and we’ll provide advice for as many as we can fit in!I hope you will join us on Wednesday, January 17, 2024, 11am MT, 1 PM ET for this no-nonsense, advice-packed session on dealing with conflict with composure.

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