Enough Time

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Time flies
Time crawls
Like an insect
Up and down the walls….



I am sure other scholars of the Post-Punk era, will be able to tell me where those lines come from.

Seriously though, are there many situations, where we find we have ‘enough time’ to do projects well? All projects are of course a compromise, regarding what can be realistically delivered, in the target timescale.

I have worked as implementer on dozens of projects and well as kick-starter and critical friend on others, more recently. The latter is becoming increasingly common and some tell me essential, to ensure projects deliver what they set out to, nothing is missed and they are done to time.

In my case, these have included replacement of housing management systems, implementation of Contractor, mobile working and self-service digital projects, as well as finance and transactional systems. From a time management viewpoint there are a number of gotchas, which often pop up.

In most of these projects, a number of days & a cost has been tendered. The client expectation is that the solution will be brought in, for around this cost/timescale, notwithstanding some change control, during the project. 

Its easy early in a project for suppliers to be a little blasé about how project days are used. Often heard is “Don’t worry, we have plenty of project days”. This phrase always makes me smile, because clearly the supplier in their bid, put in the minimum number of days, in order to do the job. I.E. keeping their costs down, to help win maximum points they could, on ‘Price’. So don’t be fooled by this.

Make every day on site count. Set objectives agreed before the day and before the supplier/implementer leaves, have them sign off objectives complete and yours and their assessment of the day. If they spent half the day onto their helpdesk, trying to iron out issues, that was not your problem and you should probably only pay half a day for that one. Alternatively, if your network was down until 12:30 and the implementer could not start their work, that clearly was the clients fault. Some canny suppliers do this, in my book, all clients should be considering it.

Documenting progress in this way and referencing it in a summary fashion at project board meetings, makes it way easier to see how time is being spent on the project.

All projects are like roller coasters with ups and downs. That’s their nature unfortunately. Getting within three months of the target go-live, that is when the microscope needs to be on the time remaining and what is left to do. By this point, we should have pretty much all deliverables and be ready to start proper UAT, after some reasonable system testing has proved the rough ‘end-to-end’ is there. If not, then this is the time, if we have not done so already, we need your supplier to step up their pace. Otherwise, they are potentially jeopardising go live.

Reasonable suppliers with some persuasion, will step up at this point, in my experience. If it is inevitable we are going to need more time for go-live, it is essential that all tasks required are known and a reasonable revised date set. I always work from the idea that what we ask for, cannot be moveable. I.E. if we say we need another 3 months, client & supplier need to be sure, come hell or hurricane Harvey, we can’t possibly be back in 2 months time, asking for more.

On a final point too, if any deliverables are pushed into phase 2, or a later one. Ensure existing quoted project days are agreed by supplier to satisfy it. This might be where your logs of how existing project time was spent comes in, to help you keep your project costs under control.       

If you have a project that you feel might need some assistance, feel free to DM or contact me for an informal chat.

Related Post: Are sales under-selling software benefits? 

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Stranglers – Enough Time.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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