It’s a tale as old as project management itself.  Somebody works up a very detailed project schedule and even assigns specific resources to tasks.  They even manage to do some basic allocation so Jake from Engineering isn’t working 120 hour weeks for the next five years. 

But in their diligence and detail, they overlook a couple of things.  They forget that everybody on the project has “a day job” they still have to get done and that recurring events like annual quality reviews or year ends or whatever still happen.  In missing them, they put the project at risk of an overly optimistic timeline with unrealistic true allocation. Continue reading →