You've taken a closer look at the schedule and you still can’t match the business delivery date with the development delivery date. Meaning you can’t have what you want when you need it. Your first instinct may be to ask or artificially reduce the durations of certain tasks. Don’t. I’m not against revisiting estimates later on but a more direct root to shortening the timeframe is reducing or eliminating tasks. How could you do this?
- Negotiate smaller sets of deliverables or features with stakeholders. This will also ensure that you get more feedback when you need it.
- Ask the development team if there is a simpler way to do something initially and then elaborate on the work later. This gives the development team a chance to see how a feature is actually being used by users.
This approach will not always go over well with managements that are used to dictating timeframes AND feature sets. The only advice I can recommend is to be up front about the need for scope reduction at the beginning of the development cycle. In other words: the scope of a project will very likely need to be reduced in order to meet a deadline. Start a dialogue about it today!
Got any ideas on reducing the scope a deliverable? Post them!
Need help with scoping out a project? Email sterg@lamda-alpha.com
