TL;DR
We presented the seventh project schedule game, the Split Focus game, where you simultaneously work on several projects. Today we present Schedule Equals Commitment, eight scheduled games. The post is based on a remarkable book written by Johanna Rothman, Manage It!
Pattern
The project schedule is a guess, not a commitment.
When managers want to put on the project team project schedule as a commitment, you play the Schedule Equals Commitment game. As a project manager, you need to care about two commitments:
- features delivered by the project team
- how good are those features?
How To Play
First, offer schedule commitment with confidence rate. The feature set with these quality attributes will be delivered by October with 90% confidence.
In date-to-date negotiation, you give more committed dates as time passes. Now (January), I commit to the second half of this year, but I will commit to a month in late February.
The best negotiation is iterative development with two weeks time-window. Your schedule commitment would be more precise than one from the previous iteration at the end of each iteration.
