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Presentation: Was the Project Really Late? (An Introduction to Schedule Risk Analysis.)

The planned project completion date is just a forecast.  When the weather forecast says it is going to rain and it doesn’t, we blame the forecast for being wrong.  We don’t say the weather was wrong.  So, why, when a project fails to be completed on time do we blame the execution of the project rather than the plan?  

Today I am going to suggest that the reason so many projects are “late” is that the original project plan was not realistic.  This is not a new idea.  In “Brookes’ Law Repealed”, Steve McConnell says:

“Late chaotic projects are likely to be much later than the project manager thinks -- project completion isn’t three weeks away, it’s six months away. ….…, but that’s not a result of Brooks’ Law. It’s a result of underestimating the project in the first place." (Steve McConnell, “Brooks' Law Repealed," IEEE Software, vol. 16, no. 6, Nov/Dec, 1999.  Brooks’ Law states that putting more resources onto a project when it is running late will make it take even longer.)

And I am going to discuss one particular reason why so many plans are unrealistic.

Speaker:

Tony Welsh was educated at Oxford University (Physics) and at the London School of Economics (Operations Research).   He spent the next 15 years in Operations Research.  In 1983, he and a partner formed Welcom to develop project management software for the IBM PC.  Tony was responsible for the development of all the algorithms in the original MS-DOS versions of Open Plan and OPERA (risk analysis).    Welcom was sold to Deltek in March 2006.  Tony recently formed a new company, Barbecana, and developed a risk analysis add-in for Microsoft Project in C#. The product is called Full Monte.  

Location:

Main Houston Public Library Branch
Concourse Level Meeting Room
500 McKinney Street
Houston, Texas 77002

Underground parking is accessible from Lamar Street. Houston Public Library underground parking tickets will be validated when brought to meeting room.

For more detailed directions, please link to http://www.houstonlibrary.org/central-library

Agenda:

5:00 - 5:30 pm Networking
5:30 - 6:30 pm Program 

PDUs:

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