There are always deadlines although these aren’t always recognized until after they have passed. They include the day on which the money or patience of whoever is funding a project is exhausted, the day on which the competition releases something that captures a market, and the day on which a technology becomes obsolete. Agile practices, such as Scrum, do not eliminate these deadlines.

As the actual deadline dates are often unknown, completing projects expeditiously is a wise practice. Good scheduling helps to do this.

A schedule should be an iterative and evolving plan. It is a model of an expected future that can be examined, critiqued and hopefully improved. A schedule is not a prophesy, a prediction or a promise. People who set out to do something usually have at least some idea of how they will get that done. When those ideas are collected, organized and written down, they form the basis of a schedule.

Schedules have been used to lie, to terrorize project teams and to create completely unrealistic expectations. These are abuses of scheduling and are not inherent in scheduling itself. Bad or abusive schedules are tied to bad or abusive management practices. Agile sometimes seems to view scheduling as a bad or abusive management practice. This is a mistake.

The Agile practice of doing the most important things first is a good one. The expectation this means projects can release whatever they have on hand at any time ignores the impact of competition. In a noncompetitive environment, such as internal IT projects, any improvement is valuable and a partial release can be successful. In a highly competitive environment, such as online games, incomplete or noncompetitive releases will be failures.

Good schedules help to clarify what the most important things are. This includes the things which take a long time to do, so that they can be started sooner, and the seemingly unimportant things on which more important things depend. Good schedules provide a bench mark against which progress can be measured and illuminate where more resources should be applied or expectations changed.

When setting out to accomplish something, it is a good idea to identify what is needed to accomplish it. Scheduling is not a perfect way to do this, but it is a better way than just sprinting from point to point in the hope of reaching the final destination before the money runs out or someone else gets there first.

Some may argue that setting and meeting deadlines forces the premature release of poor quality products. While it is certainly a bad idea to release a poor quality product, there have been too many instances of poor quality in late releases to believe that delays translate into good quality. They do translate into higher costs and missed opportunities. A good schedule is a valuable aid in meeting deadlines with quality releases.

Two things are required to deliver a project on schedule: realistic deadlines and a team determined to meet them.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” – Voltaire

When managing projects, it may help to remember that you are doing something at odds with most business practices and upsetting to many people. Projects are temporary and create something new. Most businesses are ongoing operations which recreate the same things. Because projects create something new, they are all at some level about change. Change is hard, feared and resisted.

Where operations do the same things over and over, projects do something unique. Where operations are intended to be ongoing, projects are intended to end. As operations and projects are fundamentally different, it should be apparent that the organizations, methods and mind sets best suited for operations are not the best for projects.

People, as individuals, are not central to operations. Operations are procedure-centric. They improve and refine their procedures to the point where who follows them has little impact on the quality or quantity of what is produced. Operations take advantage of the predictability inherent in repetition to insure a consistent product.

Procedures, which rely on repetition, are less useful for projects. Projects, which are always doing something new, rely on people. Projects are people-centric. Projects rely on contributions from people as individuals to create something new. Change comes from people, not procedures.

Businesses often forgo change until forced to change in order to compete in a changing and competitive world. When forced to change, projects are the instruments which implement that change. There are different types of change and different types of projects.

Project types

Projects types range from the evolutionary to the revolutionary. At one end of the range are evolutionary projects which implement incremental change, something that is very similar to what has been done before or is being done in other organizations. At the other end are truly revolutionary projects, those which seek to do something that has never been done before. The more revolutionary the project, the less predictable and less operations-like it is.

Most projects are evolutionary. When people can work in the same departments, for the same bosses, with the same people, and do nearly the same work they have done for operations, projects are neat, predictable and unthreatening. Operations are most likely to undertake evolutionary projects. These are well-suited to operations’ organizations, mind sets and experiences. When change is allowed, it is usually kept to a minimum.

Real change, revolutionary change, is hard on operations. Revolutionary change requires imagination, a willingness to take risks and an organization that allows things to be done differently. Doing things the same way (but expecting different results) does not bring change. Despite this, many operations will attempt to conduct revolutionary projects as if they are just a different type of operation.

Projects only succeed if they have the right resources. These include leadership, flexibility and determination. An organization that cannot provide these resources cannot change as it needs to. It cannot evolve. Organization that cannot evolve become extinct. Change is not only hard, it is necessary.