Project management mistakes - ridiculous resourcing

I went into a development programme once and looked at the project plan.  It looked good.  That’s the problem with Microsoft Project (and Powerpoint) - the biggest, steaming pile of junk can be made to look good.  The problem that makes this worse is that most senior managers are incapable of spotting a dodgy project plan when they’re two inches away from it. 

Having had to diagnose, then turnaround, some big projects, I went straight to the resource usage.  The first person was down to to 56 hours work on the following Monday.  It was clear that this unreality was repeated throughout the plan.  No-one bothered checking and the project manager was both new to the company and completely inexperienced.  When the real availability for the team was used, the overall duration lengthened by 700% before any optimisation.  It ended up 250% longer than the team thought when I arrived.  There’s a few other questions I ask that can prove a project is in trouble within a day (although they can’t prove the project is going well).  They were un-necessary in this case.  One question – one hit – one broken project spotted.

Planning from the start with real availability would have avoided this problem.  By real availability I mean the actual time a team member can devote to a project excluding training, holidays, meetings, distractions, coffee, lunch etc.  When you look at this you will find some of the team only have 10 hours a week to move the project forward. 

For senior managers – the ability to review a project and understand the real position accurately is vital.  That’s why you can’t leave project management to project managers!