Fast Tracking

A Few Techniques to Get a Project Back on Schedule

Fast track means that you look at activities that are normally done in sequence and assign them partially in parallel. For instance, when building a house, the frame cannot be constructed until the foundation is dry. However, if the house is large enough you may have options to fast track by starting to erect the frame on the side of the home where the foundation was poured first. The foundation will harden there first, and might allow you to erect the frame on that side, while the foundation on the far side of the home is still drying. Another way you could fast track would be to start building the walls on the ground while the foundation was drying so that the walls could be erected more quickly when the foundation dries.

Another example involves designing an IT application. Normally you would not start constructing a solution until the design was completed. However, if you were fast-tracking, you would start constructing the solution in areas where you felt the design was pretty solid without waiting for the entire design to be completed.

Fast-tracking always involves risk that could lead to increased cost and some rework later. For instance, in the example of designing and constructing an application, it’s possible that the design might change before it is finalized, and those final changes may result in having to redo some of the work already underway.

A good rule of thumb is that sequential activities can sometimes be fast-tracked by up to 33%. In other words, if you are fast-tracking, you can start the second of two sequential activities when the first activity is 67% complete. There is risk involved; however, this seems to be a level of fast-tracking risk that is normally acceptable.

Implement “Zero Tolerance” Scope Change

Many projects begin to trend over their deadline because they are doing more work than they originally committed to. This is probably the result of poor scope change management. However, if you are at risk of missing your deadline date, the project manager must work with the client and team members to ensure that absolutely no unplanned work is being requested or worked on – even if it is just one hour – without going through proper scope change management procedures. All energy should go into completing the core work that was agreed to and all additional work must be funded incrementally.

Improve Processes

When you look for the cause of the project trending over schedule, you may find that some of the internal work processes could be improved. The project manager should solicit team member feedback and look for ways that are within your team’s internal control to streamline processes. For instance, perhaps you have a daily status meeting that is not providing value and can be scaled back to once per week. You may also find that there are bottlenecks with getting deliverables approved.

If you find that there are delays caused by external processes, try to negotiate changes to the processes going forward – at least on a temporary basis. For example, you may find that activities are being delayed because people need to work on their yearly performance reviews. While these are important, perhaps the timing of completing the reviews can be changed to allow critical project activities to be completed on schedule.

This is a good technique for longer projects since you have a chance to optimize your project processes, see the results and optimize some more. However, it may not make sense for smaller projects. It is hard to do much process improvement on a 30 day project. By the time you would want to make any process improvements the project would probably be over.

Regain Commitments

Sometimes deadlines are missed so often that the team no longer has a commitment to completing their work on time or within budget. This can especially happen if team members consistently miss their deadlines without consequences. Other team members wonder why they need to work hard to meet their deadlines and budget estimates when others are not meeting theirs. When this happens, the project manager should communicate with team members to gain commitments to complete assigned work on schedule. The project manager needs to try to refocus the team to meet the deadlines they are committing to. The project manager should ask each team member for his personal commitment to do what it takes to meet budget and schedule commitments.

It may be that morale on your team is poor, but that your team members are still hitting their deadlines. That may be fine for now, but it will probably not continue. Poor morale will ultimately cause you problems with your schedule. When people have poor morale, it impacts your schedule in a number of ways.

• People are not committed to their deadlines.
  Even if they are hitting end dates now, chances are that this will not continue if the team has poor morale.

• Quality will suffer.
  People that have poor morale don’t care as much about the quality of their work and they may start getting sloppy or careless. This may make it seem like they are hitting their deadlines, but there will be more rework later.

• They may quit.
  When morale is bad, people may start to look for new opportunities. This will cause project problems if the turnover occurs.

• They spend too much time complaining.
  When people have poor morale they usually like to commiserate with others. You end up having your team spend time complaining and not spending the time that they need to complete the deliverables.

The team will work harder and perform better if they do not spend time complaining and sulking. The project manager should build shared purpose, increase camaraderie and do some fun things to get people excited and happy again. You can see more information on managing a team with poor morale at 8.2.3.P6 Attack a Team Morale Problem on Many Fronts.

Check Discretionary Dependencies

When you map out the relationship between all of the activities you will notice that some of the activities have a firm dependency and others have a soft dependency. That is, in many cases one activity must follow another activity. However, in many cases you will find that certain activities need to be done in a general timeframe and there are a number of potential activities that could be identified as the dependency. The first case is referred to as a mandatory dependency or “hard logic,” and the second case is a discretionary dependency or “soft logic.” It is important to know the difference.

Discretionary dependencies should be checked to see if you can move a discretionary relationship earlier in the schedule. This will result in starting and finishing the dependent activity earlier, which can help you accelerate the overall schedule. Of course, to have an impact, you must identify discretionary activities that are on the critical path or that influence the critical path.

It is also possible that you have some activities that have external dependencies. These dependencies are imposed by people outside of your project or by other projects. These external dependencies should be checked as well since it is possible that they can be changed in a way that will help you proactively manage your project.

Scope Back the Work or Reschedule the Deadline Date

One final option that is usually available is to look at the work remaining and negotiate with the sponsor to remove some of it from the project. If the remaining work is all vital to the solution, this discussion still might need to take place as a last resort. There may be options to complete the project on-time with less that 100% functionality, and then execute a follow-up project to complete the remaining work.

The other alternative of last resort is to request a slippage of your deadline date and see if you can complete the original work requested if you are given more time.

The key point is that you don’t jump to this alternative as soon as you start to trend past your deadline date. You should first try the other multitude of proactive options available to try to get back on schedule. You should only fall back on reducing scope or asking for more time if all the other tools and techniques fail.