Projects in Corsets

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

This winter an awful lot of people are sick an awful lot of the time. Anyone could see it coming unless they blinkered themselves with fantasies.

Hardly any of the projects I get into have been willing to make provisions for it in their schedules or budgets. If I say anything about adding wriggle room, nobody wants to hear me. Deadlines are still rigid and tight. Like a corset, they’re tolerable when everything goes right, but heaven forbid that you might need to take a deep breath.

Why are we (still) working this way? Why did we ever work this way?

If we insist on keeping deadlines, budgets and expectations as firm and close to the edge as we developed a habit of doing, we will get bitten. Hard. Repeatedly.

It used to come as a rare shock, like the time the only person who knew how to put releases together for a complicated software system nearly died in a car crash on the way to work. She was in the hospital for weeks and in recuperation for months. The rest of us floundered around figuring out how she did her job so we could pick it up.

The team I was in learned from this. We never again kept a critical role like that solely in the hands of one person.

Reality has shifted. Having a key person get sick at a critical period in a project is now common, not bad luck. Needing more than a few days out of action before illness relents enough to resume work is now common. Having a key person never fully recover is not quite common, but it is becoming less uncommon as time progresses.

Remember my electrician who remembers electrical knowledge but can’t solve problems any more? Or my supplier who can’t learn anything new any more? Or a financial advisor I know whose memory of meetings is scrambled, a worrying basis for arranging someone’s financial affairs? The list goes on.

We need to start factoring this into projects and contracts. We need latitude, flexibility, contingency options “just in case” because people may promise to work full tilt all the way through, but they can’t be sure they’ll be able to uphold that promise.

Engineers know how to fold contingency buffers into a project. They often put a percentage (say, 20%) of extra budget and time into the plan.

Contingency allowances have to get bigger, for deadlines and for the costs of schedule slippage. They haven’t yet. We also need to pay more attention to fallback options in case key people have to take an unexpected absence, have to work at a reduced pace, or have to completely drop out. We don’t do that yet.

Well, we usually don’t. A couple of projects I’ve been working with did set up a contingency in case a specific key person becomes unable to finish. You probably aren’t surprised. But most of the projects I see or get involved with still don’t.

We will all have to start doing it. Now when it’s easy, or soon after we’ve found out the hard way how much we need it now. It’s time to ditch the project corsets.