Time Effect on Project Planning and Budgeting

1. Time Effect on Project Planning and Budgeting ‘Jide Onademuren

2. Project Planning and Budgeting • A project is identified, resources allocated and work happens • Project moves through a time process from requirements, design, development, testing to deployment • What happens during this “time process” makes a project looks like a success or failure

3. Planning and Budgeting; Effect of Time • Uncertainty • Planning Fallacy • Expert Opinion • Trust • Information Flow

4. Planning and budgeting outlines how much a project will cost and how much effort will be required for delivery Planning and budgeting are subject to predictable amounts of uncertainty This occurs at various stages and time of project lifecycle When the number of decisions about planning and budgeting over time increases, uncertainty level is reduced and accuracy increases Uncertainty

5. The Cone of Uncertainty

6. It is the tendency to underestimate how long or time required to complete a task even when there is experience of similar tasks Individuals or organizations can be affected Most times planning fallacy is about personal interests The project manager/organization believes that planning and budgeting should be set in a way too hard to achieve There is the belief that it will bring better productivity or completion of project fast enough Planning Fallacy

7. Team members can also be pessimist Afraid to plan and budget They also have the fear of failure or inefficiency When new, neutral and additional resources who have no personal interests are brought in, planning fallacy is eliminated This action also enforces independent and consensus-oriented planning and budgeting Planning Fallacy (Cont’d)

8. The opinion of an expert can be required when it comes to determining how long a project might take The expert relies on his intuition or gut feel and provides an estimate Typically, he reads project details, ask one or two clarifying questions and then gives an estimate However, from agile project planning and budgeting deals with functionalities(user stories) These user stories require a variety of skills normally performed by more than one person Expert Opinion

9. This makes it difficult to find a suitable expert who can assess these skills across all disciplines On the traditional approach, planning and budgeting is associated with a task which is performed by one person A nice benefit of planning and budgeting by expert opinion is that it usually doesn’t take long Studies have shown that planning and budgeting is more accurate by expert opinion than other approaches Expert Opinion (Cont’d)

10. The frequency of reliable delivery of promised estimates builds trust between project owners and managers in planning and budgeting Project owners are reluctant to make important decisions early in a project unless estimates in the past have proved trustworthy Trust helps to make important prioritization and tradeoff decisions on time Trust helps to decide how much of a feature to be developed Reliable planning and budgeting allows work at a sustainable pace and less time is spent on highly unpredictable tasks Trust

11. Planning and budgeting conveys and describes one possibility of what may come to pass in the life of a project They communicate and establish a set of baseline expectations Far too often, a project is reduced to a single date and all assumptions and expectations that lead to the date are forgotten Without additional information there is no way of determining the sufficiency and realistic status of planning and budgeting Information Flow

12. Time helps to describe what task will be completed at what period Documentskey assumptions Establishes an approach for how it will have collaborative measurable progress When a continuous information flow is established the confidence and conclusion that can be drawn from planning and budgeting is influenced Information Flow (Cont’d)

13. Thank You