Confident of your Microsoft Project Plan?
At some point in the lifetime of an investment bank front-office project you’ve got to deliver to the desk (the business). It still amazes me that in this day and age, with all the books and knowledge we have about project management, projects are still planned from the perspective of a cosy Microsoft Project plan with appropriate milestones and high level tasks that lead to deliverables sometime in the distant future based on estimates that you know will never come true. XP/Agile doesn’t solve everything in the hectic world of front-office development, but at least if used appropriately it should help you deliver in this century without the constant daily death march to an unknown destination.
Working in the square mile or on the street requires a certain mindset – the architecture, the design, the software produced are all important, but at the end of the day, if your application never makes it to the desk, and never help a trader make money, it’s a failure.
Whenever I see a Microsoft Project Gantt chart these days I mostly dive for cover. The man hours involved in building the chart, of linking all the tasks and identifying the critical path just scare me. The funny thing is that the team leads that often have to adhere to these plans probably don’t have much faith in the plans themselves, but because they don’t know of a better way to work, they convince themselves that the Gantt chart path is the road to enlightenment.
Don’t get me wrong, Gantt charts have their place on a project. The biggest problem with Gantt charts in my view are the tasks that they are build of - usually estimated using pie in the sky techniques, with individual tasks often estimate in terms of weeks or months and updated in an ad-hoc manner based on developers best guess as to where they are on the n week task.
The next time you see a nicely coloured Gantt chart, go and ask your team lead how confident he is of the plan.
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