In preparation for the next reporting cycle, the Schedule Manager statuses the project schedule, reviews the schedule with team leads and other managers, performs basic health checks, then makes any necessary repairs and approved changes to the baseline. All these steps require critical thinking and strong attention to detail. In contrast, the mechanics of schedule reporting should be the least difficult step in the Schedule Management process.
Schedule Reporting Principles covered the criteria which makes schedule status reports useful to the project, and the necessity to report schedule slip as soon as it is convincingly anticipated. This article will touch upon some concepts for simplifying the reporting process. Then it will discuss how to review schedule status reports with key stakeholders such as clients, and how to establish expectations for dependable, sustainable Schedule Reporting to last the duration of the project.
Working With (Not Against) Schedule Management Tools
Regardless of the tools chosen, it is important to keep two things in mind. First, reporting is a means to an end, not the end itself. Report stakeholders must understand the reports’ key takeaways for the exercise to be productive. The Schedule Manager should not waste time building large, involved reports which will not be useful to the stakeholders or will not answer schedule analysis’s “Big Three” questions.1Are you on schedule? How do you know? What are you doing about it? Second, the Schedule Manager should not be afraid to automate as much of the reporting process as possible.
Manual steps in any repeated process are fraught with peril. Automation, even of trivial steps, improves accuracy and repeatability, while reducing tedium and human error. Time invested in automating schedule reporting pays even greater dividends when reports can be saved and used across projects. A good suite of reporting tools is a valuable addition to any Schedule Manager’s toolkit.
Example: Reviewing Reports with Stakeholders
It is common to review schedule reports with clients and other key stakeholders. Not only does the Schedule Manager benefit by hearing first-hand their stakeholders’ most significant concerns, but the Schedule Manager can also provide context and explanation needed to properly understand the reports’ conclusions.
The Schedule Manager also becomes the advocate and first line of defense for project managers and team leads. The Schedule Manager has the knowledge to justify why project teams may need more time, why variances do or do not impact the larger project schedule, and the long-term outlook for the project.
Meeting Focus – Are You on Schedule?
Report review meetings should be brief. Stakeholders at any level have only a small ability, and a small amount of time to affect the project. Report review meetings should focus on stakeholders’ key areas of concern where they can substantially impact the project. The summary Gantt in Figure 43 depicts a schedule in distress. Requirements and Functional Design phase is expected to finish a month late. Development and Unit Testing will finish at least a week late. Functional, String and Integration Testing should have started a month ago. On which of these problems should executive leaders focus their time?
In every project, there are delays and there are delays that matter. Executives should not spend time worrying about delays which are not driving the project.2Driving tasks are tasks which are on the critical path or otherwise preventing other work from completing. Executives and leaders should also minimize the time spent focusing on tasks which have already run late. There are very few options for rescuing work which has already fallen off the cliff, and the effort expended to make a task slightly less late usually does not pay dividends.3Experienced readers may point out that managers should spend effort remedying any overdue activities where progress has ground to a halt. They are correct. Managers should troubleshoot any blocked work. But consider the law of diminishing returns before working all week to make one task a day less late.
An executive’s real options and opportunity to recover the schedule is looking ahead. Future tasks are the tasks which a leader has real opportunity to prioritize and reshape. However, executives do not automatically know where their attention will do the project the most good.
Schedule Managers should use their meetings as opportunities to draw attention to those issues that will benefit most from management focus. Even though the late requirements look like Figure 43’s biggest red flag, leadership will likely do the project far better service by ensuring Development does not slip further, and that integration testing can proceed unencumbered.
Substantiating Schedule Status Reports – How Do You Know?
The Schedule Manager is likely to encounter resistance or disbelief when reporting delays that significantly impact the project. Fortunately, the Schedule Manager has a couple strategies to ensure that their audience hears, believes, and is empowered to act.
Like a thorough prosecutor not hinging their case on a single fingerprint, Schedule Managers are far more likely to be believed beyond a reasonable doubt when they present overlapping evidence from multiple sources. Continuing with the example in Figure 43, the summary Gantt suggests that the lost time can be recovered, however current activities probably have little or no slack left. Most schedule reports will not dwell on the technical details. But Schedule Managers must be prepared to explain how underlying schedule data support or refute leadership concerns.
Schedule Variance
Even a cursory look at the timeline shows none of the work starting on time. Only the last activity may finish on time. Whatever project forces disrupted the first five activity dates could well disrupt the sixth.
Dependencies and Driving Task Analysis
Every sub-task inside Figure 43’s three main activities should connect to other tasks. Which requirements tasks are pushing the development tasks? Which requirements and development tasks are pushing the start of Integration Testing? Why is Integration Testing still predicted to finish on time?
The Work Equation
Even the most complex schedule boils down to fundamentals. Does the team have enough time and personnel to get the work done? Suppose the Development Team estimates that they have 2,230 hours of Remaining Work (i.e., Remaining Effort). If they have ten team members with one working half time, and twenty-five days to complete development, Figure 44’s basic algebra shows that the team won’t finish on time. The good news is that leadership and the project team have five weeks to figure out how to recover.
Corroboration with Team Leads
The Schedule Manager may see the big picture, but only the team members in the trenches know how their work is really going. Is the truncated Integration Testing time a problem for the Test Team? The team lead is the stakeholder most likely to know the answer. Their and other team leads’ input into the schedule corroborates not only the schedule’s accuracy but also what options and outcomes are realistic.
History and Trends
Consistent schedule reporting chronicles a project’s entire history and means that no report stands in a vacuum. Was this week’s emergency noticeable last week? Are the delays growing worse or better? How much schedule slack are project teams consuming? How often has Integration Testing been delayed? All these historic trends allow the Schedule Manager to substantiate their forecasts to senior stakeholders.
Empowering Managers to Act – What Are You Doing About It?
The dire news presented in Figure 43 comes with a significant silver lining. The entire team has weeks to outmaneuver the icebergs on the horizon. Not all schedules can be rescued. But the more managers and team leads understand about specific causes and possible solutions to delays, the more likely they are to make informed choices which will substantially benefit the project and the team.
Setting Reporting Trends in Good Times
Effective Schedule Reporting is crucial to removing surprise delays. If the Schedule Manager sets the trend for properly maintaining the schedule file and good reporting, significant delays should be detected and reported with substantial advance warning. The best time to establish good reporting practices is at the project’s beginning, while the news is still good.
Projects always appear to start well during the opening weeks. Most teams will complete their kickoff activities on time. Even work that immediately slips has an easy path to recovery, assuming at least some slack was built into the schedule. Most stakeholders will not object to comprehensive Schedule Reporting in a project’s early phases when the reports show favorable progress. If a project begins to be impacted by delays or other schedule concerns, the Schedule Manager can lean on the already established reporting trends to maintain the flow of communication about the schedule. It is far more difficult for managers and clients to interrupt an established reporting trend than to block a new one. Consistent reporting trends also protect project teams and the Schedule Manager against stressful requests to drop everything and provide an instant status report.
Avoiding Instantaneous Schedule Reporting
Managers or clients hit by an emergency, often want to know the schedule status “as of today”. This presents two practical challenges. First, the Schedule Manager cannot produce a new schedule report “as of today”, without first bringing the project schedule up to date “as of today”. Any reports produced from a schedule that is only partially up to date are valueless, and the steps required to status and analyze even small schedules take time. Time is not abundant in an emergency.
Second, instantaneous schedule reports do not provide the information which managers and clients need to develop a rescue plan, unless the schedule has never been reported on. Projects cannot pivot on a dime. Changes which affect a project’s next five days will not correct the project’s long-term trajectory but will disrupt project teams’ regular routine. The decisions which will rescue the project schedule are those that shape the next five weeks or months. For that level of strategic thinking, a schedule report which is an hour old won’t be much more beneficial than a report that is a week old.
Reporting in Arrears to Look Further Ahead
To be sustainable, schedule reporting cannot be a time critical emergency every time a report is due. Statusing the schedule, reviewing the schedule and remedying or mitigating delays takes team leads and the Schedule Manager time. How does a Schedule Manager make time to perform all the preparatory steps necessary to produce a high-quality report?
Figure 22 in Schedule Statusing Techniques illustrated the process for analyzing the entire schedule with a one-week buffer between the schedule’s status date and the subsequent reports. Project managers’ and clients’ first reaction to this idea is usually one of horror. Schedules are dynamic, and a schedule report’s useful shelf life is short. Why should any team try to make decisions with old data?
In this case, the “old” data is not that old. And it has the benefit of having undergone a vigorous peer review process. Even if all work came to a complete halt between report updates, all major events would only shift by a week. Strategic decision makers can usually live with that level of uncertainty since such a disaster would probably be mentioned. Remember also that schedule reports should be looking ahead to see delays far in advance. An emergency with weeks of advance warning is inherently not an emergency.4Emergency (n) – A sudden, urgent, usually unexpected occurrence or occasion requiring immediate action. (Source: Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, 2019)
Furthermore, the analysis process alerts team leads to trouble days before schedule reports are produced. By the time reports are read, managers can already be taking corrective action. Reports are the last word on the schedule, not the first.
Next Steps
Schedule reporting capstones the cyclical Schedule Management process that includes creating new schedules, updating the baselining, checking the schedule’s health, making routine repairs, statusing the schedule, and reviewing with stakeholders. The next step after completing a schedule report is to repeat the process all over again.
Every week a Schedule Manager faithfully executes the process is another week the team stays in control – no matter what else happened. It takes time to hone the process. Every cycle, look for ways to streamline and improve every aspect. Tantamount to that is schedule maintenance.