An old joke about optimism: someone jumps from a 50 story building, and during his fall someone on the 25th floor asks him how it’s going. “So far so good!”

The day before your deadline

Your project has a due date, and on that due date you have either accomplished the goal or you haven’t.

The day before your due date, the same is true: either the goal is achieved one day early, or it hasn’t. The obvious follow-up question is will the goal be achieved on the due date?

N days before your due date, either the goal is achieved or not. If not, are N days sufficient to complete the remaining work?

Completion date estimator: are you feeling lucky?

You might not have noticed in the news (?), but a very heated debate transpired recently about how to estimate completion dates in the FOCUS tool.  FOCUS has a numerical engine that extrapolates a completion date of your project, and at the core of the debate is how optimistic or pessimistic do you want to be?

Take this hypothetical example: one week into your year-long project, your team is a little bit behind plan, achieving about half of what you expected to get done that week. Should your ECD be revised to reflect your project taking two years to complete instead of one?

“We are going to hit the ground”

This school of thought strictly adheres to the go ugly early philosophy, and would indeed want to show an ECD two years out. The thought is, if nothing changes, you want that scary prospect to be the motivation to speed up earlier to avoid scrambling at the end.

“We are falling”

This camp believes that the best thing for the team is to show the schedule slipping at the rate the team is slipping, without wildly extrapolating dire consequences. Therefore the ECD should only slip by one half week.

“So far so good”

This strategy is a joke, literally. Scroll up to the top of this post if you’ve already forgotten!

Beware the project manager who says something to the effect of being behind is OK, because we’ll catch up to the plan because we’ll go faster, because we will, we have to. Even if schedule buffer consumption is at terminal velocity, this project manager will tell you “so far so good!”