Chapter 15. More Problems with Schedules

Four weeks later I was hovering over Amanda's workstation, trying to find out what was wrong with our project management software.

"Explain this to me again please, Amanda," I asked.

"Like I told you, Will, I've been keeping our plan up-to-date on a daily basis. Every time one of our detailed design activities starts, I put the actual start date into the software, and every time something finishes, I put that in too. I want to make sure we stay right on top of this schedule."

"That's good," I told her. "I really do appreciate your efforts. But why is this a problem?"

She continued, "That part isn't the problem. The problem happened here," She pointed to the screen, which was displaying the Gantt chart schedule. Her finger was on one of the software design tasks. "Hans told me that he is having this task done by a local consultant because we don't have the expertise. It just finished now."

I looked at the screen, and for the first time noticed that there were two bars for every task listed. The top one appeared to be the planned start, finish, and duration of the task, and I guessed that the bottom one would represent how long the task actually took. The task she was pointing to should have finished two weeks ago. "What does this do to our completion date for finishing the detailed design?" I asked, trying not to sound panicky.

"That's where the problem is!" Amanda told me triumphantly. "I don't know! When I put in the actual finish date, ...

Get Making It Happen: A Non-Technical Guide to Project Management now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.