Most people believe that If you hold people accountable, they will finish individual tasks on time and on budget.
The entire project will then be on time and on budget.
Instead we ask to Discard Local Schedules and Measurements, and use Total Buffers.
The traditional approach is to turn task schedules and estimates into commitments.
Unfortunately, this traditional approach only leads to longer projects.
They cause execution to become difficult.
How?
In planning, accountability for task-times causes people to include contingencies in their commitments.
People have to plan for uncertainties.
But, people spend most of the time waiting for one thing or another.
That is how project plans extend.
In execution, resources scatter across too many projects.
People also have an incentive to work on easy tasks.
Tasks that will help them beat or meet their estimates.
Instead of working on tasks that are most critical to the project.
Allow individual tasks to exceed their planning estimates.
To protect projects from task delays, insert safety :
– where multiple legs of a project meet, and
– at the end of the project.
With:
– lower Work in process,
– the pressure to meet estimates gone, and
– buffers to take care of uncertainties,
the contingencies embedded inside task estimates are no longer needed.
Take out this extra time.
This rule allow for
– shorter project plans
– easier execution
With shorter project plans there is:
– less pressure to start projects as soon as possible;
– extra time can be used to get ready for execution through better preparation.