I was reading the latest post on Johanna Rothman’s Managing Product Development blog.  In it she says,

Serial lifecycles provide a (false) prediction. And, boy oh boy, is that prediction comforting to your senior managers. “When will the project be done?” might be their most-asked question. Of course, a serial lifecycle provides a prediction that’s almost guaranteed to be wrong, especially if you use a project scheduling tool. The tool provides you a single-point estimate, which is the first date you can’t guarantee the project won’t be done by”“the first possible, optimistic date.

I like that characterization of the predicted date.  Another characterization, usually true of serial lifeycles, is that the predicted delivery date is the first day of schedule slip.  I’ve seen many serial projects get almost to that date before they first admit that they’re in trouble. Read More