Project Delays Your project schedule has just been developed

Project Delays Your project schedule has just been developed and approved by the sponsor and distributed to all the stakeholders. One of the resources on the team, Tina, realizes that some key tasks were left out of the plan, which can impact her tasks and she may not complete them in the allotted time. You request new estimates on the time she needs to complete her tasks. Her estimates will change the schedule but not impact the critical path.

What steps in the schedule planning were omitted (if any)?

How would you handle this situation and why?

Provide a rationale in support of your answer.

Solution

What steps in the schedule planning were omitted (if any)?

In the process of planning a project schedule, the first step is to a list of ALL activities, estimates their duration, the dependency relationships among them and the break points.

In this case, if an activity was left out of the plan, is because it was not in the initial list, it is a planning error.
Besides, apparently that activity was not contemplated in the whole schedule because its inclusion implies changes in it, which means that this activity is part of the critical path.

How would you handle this situation and why?

In this kind of situations there are some measures that it can be taken.
In first instance, critical path method works with the earliest and longest time to accomplish an activity, therefore, there is a margin to hurry some activities to include this that was excluded. Flexibility always must be included.

Other course of action is more radical, it is replanning all the project, start from beginning, to rethink activity list, duration, dependencies and end points.

You can design parallel\'s near critical paths, which are an option in this type of contingency.