Delivering IT Projects

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Can the Team Really Give 110%?

Posted by Cathryn in : Project Management , trackback

One of the major reasons projects fail and teams become frustrated with their project manager is planning for staff to spend 100% (or more!) of their time on the project.

I remember once discussing with the IT Director of a large company why his projects were failing, and suggesting that one reason was because the staff were unable to do the work in the time allocated. Plans were done, estimates of effort were made, the work was allocated nicely so that noone was over allocated, but still deadlines were not met.

It’s very simple.

There are 52 weeks of 5 days in a year. That’s 260 days.

Deduct:
9 days for bank holidays
25 days for annual leave
5 days for sick leave
5 days for training, company seminars and other major meetings

That leaves 216 days, call it 43 weeks. Already, we’re down to 83% of the staff member’s time to spend on the project.

Then comes the tricky bit. How much time do you allocate for work that is necessary but not the tasks that team members are doing? A weekly project meeting, a monthly meeting with their line manager, time spent reading emails, filling in timesheets, answering other peoples questions, quickly helping out on something that’s gone wrong on the project before last. And then there are coffee breaks, smoking breaks, that quick check of the football results and the discussion about last nights episode of Big Brother - not ‘necessary’ perhaps, but very very difficult to ban.

All these extras can easily add up to half a day a week, even if managed well. So, chances are that your team can only realistically give between 70% and 80% of their time to the project.

Finally, if they have any other responsibilities, particularly for support or maintenance of existing systems, that time needs to be formally agreed and included. It is astounding how often people have these responsibilities, often unbeknownst to their line managers or resourcing staff. There may well be a discussion to be had there. The best time to have it is when the person first comes onto the team, when you are planning their time.

It is not unusual to find that a team member is really only available to the project half the time, or less.

When you’re planning, you have three choices about how to deal with this:

Ignore it in the hope that it goes away. It won’t.

Negotiate away as much of the non-project time as you can. If the assignment is a short one, you may be able to get agreement for no holidays to be taken, and no courses to be attended. That is very dependent on the company. In some places I’ve worked you’ve been lucky if, as the project manager, you’ve even been told ahead of time that someone is planning a holiday.

Plan it in sensibly and live with the situation

A good project manager will try the to negotiate, and will then plan sensibly with what’s left. As a rule of thumb, I use 75% unless there are unusual circumstances. The most likely reason for changing that is for contractors who have agreed not to take holidays. Even so, I would not go above 85%.

But, you may argue, my team are dedicated and will give 110%. Good, I would reply. That means you’ve got a way of dealing with the problem if the estimates are bad or something unexpected crops up. If your team are fully resourced on the project from the start, you’ve nowhere to go and your project is very likely to fail.

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