Applied Software Project Management

Use the Schedule to Manage Commitments

A project schedule represents a commitment by the team to perform a set of tasks. When the project manager adds a task to the schedule and it's agreed upon by the team, the person who is assigned to that task now has a commitment to complete it by the task's due date. Senior managers feel that they can depend on the schedule as an accurate forecast of how the project is going to go—when the schedule slips, it's treated as an exception, and an explanation is required. For this reason, the schedule is a powerful tool for commitment management .

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 represent 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 disagreement will come up during the schedule review. Typically, ...