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TL;DR
Your job as a Product Owner (PO) or Project Manager (PM) is not to have all the answers. Your job is to have a vision, and to communicate options to stakeholders and business decision-makers.
Analysis and Solutions
What if somebody is asking a salary increase? if I keep him, I have higher costs. Hence probably my budget will blow up. I can try to ...
5
In certain cases it is possible to get more work done if you introduce more people.
The most usual scenario is when teams take time to do detailed scoping and when the project itself allows low coupling among the components.
In my experience this has rarely happened. Communication grows a lot by adding a single member and administrative tasks requiere more ...
5
A use case might be procurement of a service/software that is a pay-as-you-go service that won't be used until a certain release point. You want to wait as long as possible before procurement to ensure you're not wasting money up front.
There are a lot of other use cases.
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This is no different than the probabilistic of weather events and those projects that can be affected by weather. And it is even similar to the probabilistic availability and performance of labor and machine resources. The key is to understand the distribution of weather impact on the mountain over many years. This means, in order to properly plan work on ...
4
The short answer is yes.
You absolutely want to keep the client informed of limitations or other gotchas in the project. You rarely will know the full story and thus lack the perspective to know if this will be a major impact.
A longer answer needs to dig into how you got where you are. Ben, Miles and CodeGnome all touch on this in their answers. I'd ...
4
Have a Communications Plan
You appear to be missing a Communications Plan, which is an essential aspect of most projects. This plan would include details such as what your stakeholders need to know and when they need to know it.
Be Agile: Don't Prescribe Implementation Details
From a more agile perspective, a better question is whether or not the ...
4
A simpler reason is if you are dealing with something that has a short expiration window, such as fresh shrimp or ice without freezer space. You would want the delivery to come "Just-in-time" or as late as possible.
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This constraint makes sense when you have a task with any of the following characteristics:
It can take place at any point in time, up to a point, but there is a future event/date/task by which it must be done
There are higher priority tasks which you would prefer take place before said task, but which are not literal predecessors of the task
There is an ...
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The answer will be peculiar to the individual project. Wallace's law of project management the PM's primary job is to inform stakeholders of the effect of any change on Scope, Schedule, and Quality.
Your question is perceptive - it is the reason that they hire a PM. A good PM will always have an answer "If I gave you an extra N% budget, how would you ...
3
Different tasks have different degrees of resources elasticity. And a task in itself can have different degrees of elasticity depending on other present variables like the environment.
Imagine ten patients needing surgery with one surgeon. Then, add four more surgeons. Would anyone argue that the duration to complete those surgeries worsened? Hope not. ...
3
Some visualizations says that no projects live in the middle of the triangle. But I wonder why?
Projects can live in the middle of the triangle, but typically there is going to be one (or two) drivers that are stronger than the other/s which is why the question tends to be posed "Which are more important in this instance?".
The theory is if you're creating ...
3
On the basis it should slip to the following Monday-
Add a milestone that depends on the predecessor with a lag of five days and add that milestone as a predecessor to your Monday task.
Then we have the issue of only starting on Monday in MS-Project 2003. I cannot recall, but I don't think 2003 had task calendars. If that is true you will need to create a ...
3
If we go back to PMBoK basics, the definition in the 5th edition is is:
Critical Chain Method: A schedule method that allows the project team
to place buffers on any project schedule path to account for limited
resources and project uncertainties.
vs.
Critical Path Method: A method to estimate the minimum project method duration and determine the ...
3
As a note, lead time in Microsoft Project is expressed as a negative value in the lag field on a predecessor/successor relationship. So if you had a two tasks:
Task 1: Purchase Steel
Task 2: Erect Steel Structure
the link relationship for Task 2 would be 1FS+80days.
3
Lead time is the delay between the initiation and execution of a process. For example, the lead time between the placement of an order and delivery of a new car from a manufacturer may be anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months.
According to the Business Dictionary, Purchasing lead-time is the, "Interval between a decision to purchase an item and its receipt at ...
3
TL;DR
Quality is a widely-recognized project management constraint. To the extent that one can modify the quality controls applied to a project, one can impact the quality of the deliverables. In addition, by adjusting quality, one can impact other constraints that affect (or are affected by) the quality control process such as schedule or budget.
Agile ...
3
Let's simplify your question down. Feature A is expected to cost $X to deliver and in reality costs $1.2X to deliver. This can be because of a raise, inflation, change in needs, or a ton of other reasons.
Let's assume for a moment that quality is a constant and you can't just release shoddy work to meet your deadlines. You mentioned the traditional iron ...
2
Quality has to be a constraint, whether or not it is measurable by itself or is so intrinsic to scope is another question.
I disagree with your assertion that you can't control quality and that it cannot be measured. The key is that you have to define what you mean by "quality" up front, in other words how well does a piece of functionality have to work in ...
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Tasks are split by MS-Project when higher priority tasks take precedence over resources assigned and the position of the splits within tasks is therefore somewhat arbitrary and can move (according to resource levelling across the project). Accordingly there is no sense whereby attaching a constraint to a section of a split task has any meaningful use in ...
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Ashok gives a great definition for Purchasing lead-time.
Because the term lead time, is a catch-all for a whole load of preceding tasks, its even more important to check how the estimate for its duration came about. A special consideration for you would be to check a little more rigoriously how the estimate has come about. Some questions you may want to ...
2
My experience has been that when the client refuses to accept your advice, the best approach is to focus on highlighting the pain.
By that, I mean you use information radiators and reporting to make it clear the impact of decisions that are being made.
This helps in two ways:
The client no longer feels you are telling them what to do and may become less ...
2
Due to the history, it does not sound like you will ever convince her of the need for a more sophisticated PM approach. At this stage, if I were in your shoes, document and publish to as many stakeholders as you're able, politics in check, the threat you see, the likelihood of impact, where you'll be impacted, and your recommendations. Do so in writing so ...
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The project management "iron" triangle is problematic.
It does not realistically represent the relationship between the three chosen aspects.
It does not consider quality (except, perhaps, as a result) or value provided (does it meet the needs).
It has been "improved" with other variations including, but not limited to,
Diamond which adds quality
PMBOK 4 ...
2
One way to think about it is to consider if the task would be marked "Effort Driven" if you were creating an MS Project Plan for it. Effort driven tasks are actually expedited by adding people (at least up to a point). The Mythical Man Month idea that adding more people to a late software project will make it later is true for knowledge workers on a ...
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A lot of the other answer, cover the case where there is a lot of independence. But what if there is no space on the team to add anyone, then is it ever possible.
Hire a specialist in an area that you are stuck (on critical path).
Introduce pair programming, each pair made up of one old-timer, and one newbie. Rotate the pairs each day, so that the newbies ...
2
If you want a salary increase, I need to be able to justify it by showing that your your work saves costs on other elements of the project.
Is your code of sufficient quality that the total cost of fixing bugs/technical debt is reduced?
Is your code faster than it was last year so that I can show that the salary increase will actually save us money ...
1
Projects often spend extra to make a deadline
Alan gave a good answer pointing out the limitations of the project management "iron" triangle.
To answer your specific question, you need to consider that projects (not necessarily software projects) often plan to spend extra money to make a tight deadline. Examples of such extra spending to make a deadline ...
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I take a slightly different stance with my answer:
"that's not how it works, this is too complex for estimates."
and
she often refers to me as her most trusted asset (also uncomfortable
for me, I don't think it's appropriate to do this in front of staff)
I think your sponsor likes you and that is good news. She actually enjoys that you are so ...
1
There must be an official agreement, that establishes your position and responsibilities during the project.
1. The best scenario is for you to find the way to protect your position, the project and your team:
a) Find some analytics that will help you in the future why metrics and planification matter (In long term they will show that you have your reasons)...
1
Constraints
Assumption: you're asking about Microsoft Project and not using the term "constraint" in a more generic way. If that assumption is correct then Microsoft's support article defines the various constraints available in Project. Constraints introduce rules that limit when MS Project will allow tasks to begin or end. In some situations, constraints ...
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