The Ten Fallacies of Project Management

#9 - Setting overly aggressive schedules / goals works.

 I've worked for many CIOs who beleive that setting a very aggressive schedule sets up a project to deliver quicker than if it was planned on a more paced schedule. I have never known this to work. When you have an overly aggressive schedule you have no contigency time. The smallest hiccup or delay will have an enormous ripple effect. Once the first ripple hits, the rest follow just like a bolder thrown into a pond. If a project has to meet an aggressive date then you need to identify the most critical scope items and focus efforts on delivering those. On IT projects with aggressive schedules you will have to increase your testing effort as it is likely the aggressive schedule will result in a higher defects rate.