Reflection on “A Low Tolerance for Error, By Bertsche, April 2015”

The article “A Low Tolerance for Error” discussed how critical it is to create a reasonable estimate and come up with manageable expectations. The article also discussed the estimation challenges, and mentioned eight main problems that project teams face in project management.

The main problems that project managers needs to avoid to get an accurate estimation are; Living in the Past (relying on historical data alone), Public-Sector Optimism, Varying Experience Levels between team members, The Top-Down Decree (presented by executive pressure), The ‘Just a Quick Look’ Client (that leads to many adjustments), Continuous Changes, The Holiday Factor (not considering the holidays in the project charter), and finally, Multitasking (Overlapping activities).

Some of the lessons learned are that it is crucial to focus on similar present projects, and understand what changed from the projects of the past. Another lesson is that project managers should keep in mind that today’s budgets and funding keep changing, and they need to be ready to propose alternative scope in the event of funding cuts. Additionally, project managers need to communicate before they estimate; understanding the team members’ previous knowledge and experience, and consider that in the estimation by adding a risk factor. Finally, project managers need to understand that the problem is not that the estimate changes, but the problem is assuming it will not, so they should treat the estimate from the beginning as a changing document.

I worked with a company called AIC for five years as a group leader, and I was asked all the time to provide a time estimate or schedule for my team’s work. One of the challenges was considering the holidays in my estimate. In one of the projects that I worked with, I had team member from so many countries, Italy, China, USA, UAE, Egypt, Jordan, KSA. All these countries have different holiday seasons, so for that year, the communication stopped for almost two months because always one of the key team members was somewhere spending the holiday with his/her family. That made the rest of the team make assumptions, to be able to continue working, and unfortunately, most of these assumptions were not fully accurate, and that did lead us to so much of rework.