Missing Your Date – Sealing Your Fate
If you decide to drive 3,000 miles in six days, you would need to cover 500 miles a day. But if you only cover 300 miles on Monday, 200 on Tuesday, and 200 more on Wednesday, what are your chances of hitting your destination on Saturday at your current pace?
When faced with IT projects, you plot your progress in the same way. You know you have a go-live date of November 30, so you intend to have Planning done in February, Design in April, Tailoring in July, Testing in October, and Training in November. BUT…when you don’t finish Planning until March, Design gets pushed back. When Design finishes up in June, it pushes Tailoring back two months. And already, you can see how missing that first date has started to seal your fate.
It doesn’t take a whole lot to be able to predict that your go-live date is in jeopardy. Ever fallen into this trap? If you have, you are not alone.
Many, many projects suffer from missed dates. And surprisingly, the majority of projects start missing dates in the first phase! Why? Maybe this sounds familiar: a hospital decides they want to be live on System X by a certain date. The vendor confirms that it can be done – the date is now etched in stone. But then the contract needs a tweak here and a legal review there. And there’s still the matter of signing that PO, not to mention you’d better assign a PM. So, once the ink has dried and the kickoff is about to begin, you actually start the project six weeks behind schedule, unable to adjust the go-live date.
Date slippage is every Project Manager’s headache, but it becomes the project’s nightmare when the dates have slipped before the project even begins.
The message to all CIOs is to stand up and speak up early in the process. The first key to proper date management is to avoid allowing a vendor to set the date too early, and avoid letting your executive team dictate a date that you might not be able to safely deliver. You should let the activation date be set as a result of YOUR Planning phase. A good Project Manager will take into account contingencies, resources, conflicting projects, and many other things that are often overlooked by a vendor.
The second key to proper date management is to keep the milestones visible and your team leaders focused on those dates. They should be fully aware of the importance of hitting each date, and serious discussion should occur the first time any date is missed. The team must understand that the project plan can be like a house of cards, and missing dates early can be similar to pulling a card out from the base.
Pay close attention to the dates, keep everyone focused on the milestones, and work as a team to hit every date in the plan, and you can avoid falling victim to, “Miss Your Date – Seal Your Fate.”