Throughout my career as a project manager I came across a couple of mistakes that project managers make when planning projects.
The most common mistake project managers make when scheduling their project is use effort (work) instead of duration (the time that will pass before a task is completed) when scheduling tasks. Let’s first look at work, work is typically the hours of effort it would take to complete a certain task, let’s say for instance a website would take a developer 5 days to complete (Duration) in other words from when the developer starts work to the time that you can actually see the website it will take 5 days, now in order to complete this task there will be a bunch of smaller sub tasks with varying effort that will be required to be completed in order to build a website. Some sub tasks could take 3 hrs and some could take 6 hrs to complete, the major mistake that project managers make is to take the estimated work hours of the tasks to be completed and string them together back to back in order to get to a finish date, in this specific example this would probably have been something like 34 hrs, in which case the project manager would have scheduled the duration to be 34 hrs instead of 5 days.
Now duration, duration is the time it will take, taking everything into account for a project to be delivered as the final product, like our website, for duration you usually work in days, but you can work in weeks and months too, the biggest thing about duration is, that it is the physical time that will pass from start to finish, lets look at an example, you start a task this morning at 11:00 the task is scheduled to take 7 hrs of effort (work) and is suppose to then finish at 18:00 today in real time. Realistically you will not be able to show the client the finished product as normal working hours for this client is 08:00 to 17:00 so the duration for this task is then 1 day, which will mean that you actually took an additional day to complete the task because of the physical time constraints you have.
And here is why in this example it is imperative that we use duration instead of effort to schedule our deliverables, no person can work like a machine hour after hour without taking a break, or do something that is not planned on the schedule, and as such you cannot realistically schedule someone to complete tasks using only effort, what if tasks overflow days in other words if a tasks will take 5 hours to complete but you only have 2 left in the day what now, are you realistically going to be able to start where you left it the previous day tomorrow without any delay? The best way to counter the above is to tell a story, project managers needs to understand that the schedule is a living document and is a recount of what actually happened, what is currently happening and what will happen in the future.
So tell yourself the story and see if it makes sense when you go though the schedule, do the tasks follow chronologically whether they are happening in tandem or not, does it make sense physically or do you maybe need more time to hand over one deliverable before starting the next? Just continue to tell the story of how this project will be executed and remember that effort does not equal duration.
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