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One common complaint among project managers attempting to improve the way their
organizations build software is that the changes they make don’t take root. Typically, the
project manager will call a meeting to announce a new tool or technique—he may ask the
team to start performing code reviews, for example—only to find that the team does not
actually perform the reviews when building the software. Things that seem like a good
idea in a meeting often fail to “stick” in practice.
This is where the schedule is a very valuable tool. By adding tasks to the schedule that rep-
resent the actual improvements that need to be made—for example, by scheduling all of
the review meetings—the project manager has a much better chance of gaining a real
commitment from the team.

If the team does not feel comfortable making a commitment to the new practice, the dis-
agreement will come up during the schedule review. Typically, when a project team mem-
ber disagrees with implementing a new tool or technique, he does not bring it up during
the meeting where it’s introduced. Instead, he will simply fail to use it, and build the soft-
ware as he has on past projects. This is usually justified with an explanation that there
isn’t enough time, and that implementing the change will make the task late.
By explicitly adding a task to the schedule, the project manager ensures that enough time
is built in to account for the change. This cements the change into the project plan, and
makes it clear up front that the team is expected to adopt the practice. More importantly,
it is a good consensus-building tool because it allows team members to bring up the new
practice when they review the project plan. By putting the change out in the open, the
project manager encourages real discussion of it, and is given a chance to explain the rea-
son for the practice during the review meetings. If the practice makes it past the review,
then the project manager ends up with a real commitment from the team to adopt the
new practice.

Diagnosing Scheduling Problems
When a project manager doesn’t create a schedule, the organization is given an unrealistic
view of how the project will progress. When schedules are not correct, the project man-
ager usually has to resort to drastic measures in order to try to bring the project in line

with the organization’s expectations, and those measures often don’t work. Even when
they do, they hurt the morale of the team, and they frequently hurt the quality of the soft-
ware produced as well.

Working Backward From a Deadline
One of the most common problems that affects a project is that the deadline, which
seemed perfectly reasonable when the project started, begins to seem completely unrealis-
tic as the date starts getting closer. This is often caused by a project manager facing a dead-
line that cannot be changed. Usually, the date comes from marketing or customer
relations needs. Instead of being based on estimates of actual effort from the team, expec-
tations are based on agreements between project managers, senior managers, and stake-

70 CHAPTER FOUR