I've had a like / hate thing with work back
schedules over the years. It’s the eternal battle between building your plan
quickly or building it with precision. The answer to this battle is somewhere
in between the two.
A work back schedule is a very high level
timeline that you draft out on a white board starting with the last deliverable
of the project, and marking down the broad stroke milestones going backwards to
the beginning. Then you use your understanding of roughly how long each of
those deliverables usually take and plot in the dates, starting with the go
live / launch milestone, with the date that was already promised to the client
and written in pencil on the back of a cocktail napkin by your sales rep!
By the time you get to the beginning of the
timeline, (the last item you mark on the board) you’ll see whether you have
plenty of run way, or whether you're launching B-25B Mitchell U.S. Army Air Force bombers from the deck of a U.S. Navy Aircraft carrier (See the Doolittle Raid on Japan for the reference ;)!
What
you end up with is a very basic but good educated guess on how much time you’ll
need to execute your project.
The broad stroke deliverables (if you manage IT
projects for example) working backwards from the go live date, could be:
· Deployment (Change board approval & code
deployment) – 5 days
· User Acceptance Testing (user experience) – 4
weeks
· Quality Assurance Testing (testing that
functionality works and doesn’t break production) – 4 weeks
· Development (writing code / configuration) – 4
weeks
· Functional Requirements Documentation
(documenting HOW the code needs to work / functions that it will need to
perform) – 4 weeks
· Business Requirements Documentation (documenting
WHAT the functionality needs to do) – 4 weeks
· Use Cases (documenting process flows of what the
functionality needs to do to satisfy the business goals.) – 2 weeks
· Submit business case to the project review &
prioritization committee – 1 week.
This means that your guesstimate total duration
for this project is about 6 months from start to finish.
If the napkin said that the target go live date
was January 1st 2014, you would have needed to start your project July
1st 2013. If today is Oct 13th 2013, your gap (the difference between
your preferred or target go live date, and what it would actually be if you
started today) is about 3 ½ months. Your go live date is likely closer to April
15th 2014.
Now this is NOT an exact science, BUT it does
give you a good idea on the do-ability of this project in the
time you've got to work with.
Now you can make choices about how to satisfy
this business need. Do you scale back the scope of the project to recover 3 ½
months? Do you break the project into smaller phases so that you can deliver
SOMETHING by Jan 1st? Do you add more resources to speed up
delivery? Do you negotiate moving the target date out? You have options, which
at this early stage of the project are much easier to discuss and gain support
for than you would if you waited until you developed the detailed project plan
and are well into the project.
If you wait, it will be too late to have these
conversations without a lot of push back. This is where you build your brand
and add value as a project manager.
The risks of using this approach incorrectly
include making the mistake of using this work back schedule as your execution
plan. You will need to re-assess your plan based on information that you find
out once the functional requirements are done and your developers have had a
chance to provide their Level of Effort (LOE). You will need to build out the
details of your plan with more precise information and re-calibrate it once you
have this LOE.
As a result you should not commit to a delivery
based on the work back schedule. It is a thumb-in-the-air guesstimate, not a
precise forecast. It gives the key parties a good idea of the general scope of
the project, not an exact prediction.
The value add you bring to the table includes the
ability to gauge the scope and duration of a project quickly and early on, so
that your business leads and sales team can manage the message as early on as
possible.
You can use your work back plan as your barometer
to determine how realistic the target date is (or not). And most importantly,
you have milestones to drive your team towards for the first few deliverables -
project committee approval of scope, development of use cases, business
requirements and functional requirements. Because these deliverables can be
subjective and involve departments that do not normally work within the
confines of a timeline, they need to have target dates to have their work
complete IF the target date is going to be a realistic date for your ‘go
live’.
It also allows them to prioritize their work. No
target dates for these early deliverables equates to an absence of urgency for
your team (i.e., low priority). Your project sits in limbo while you WAIT for
direction. Even without all of the details you can still drive your project
forward. DO NOT WAIT!
The benefit to you as the project manager is that
it gets your team working NOW, while it buys you time to build out your more
detailed project plan. No one is waiting on you (and pressuring you) to get a
plan put out there yet.
Take advantage of this time to press your team
forward while you build more precision into your plan. The analogy that I use
is that you know that you need to go west from the start. You may not know if
your final destination is Los Angeles, San Francisco or Las Vegas. Your work
back schedule is like a compass. Your detailed project plan is more like a GPS.
In both cases you are marching west. The detailed plan will give you specific
routes but you still have to go west. You may need to alter your course a bit
but you have already started marching.
The alternative is to wait until you have every
route, detour, alternate route, gas stop, hotel, restaurant, Wal-Mart, Pep
Boys, etc. mapped and planned out before you leave your house. Time wasted that
you cannot recover. Your 6 months extends to 10 months or more while you put
everyone on hold until you’ve got your masterpiece plan. However your business
will have lost ground and position in the market place. You are either driving
the bus or trying to catch it.
You can’t lead from behind. Get in front of it
early and provide your team direction while you figure out the details to build
your ‘Mona Lisa’.
This process is a
powerful tool to add to your PM tool kit for improving your brand and your
reputation for execution excellence in project management. For more information on
tools & techniques that you can use to improve your project performance in
increase the value of your brand join us on Twitter @exOrionLLC.
by Sean Best, PMP. Owner of exOrion LLC. His 20+ years of project
management experience includes work in the banking, payment processing,
telecommunication and software development industries. He can be reached at sbest@exorion.net
