On Time Delivery Matters - the Most!

On Time Delivery Matters. Based on project execution style, it seems like most companies are forgetting that.

When I arrived at the airport on my way back home, I found out that my flight had been cancelled. I went to the information desk to ask them what I can do. “We recommend that you buy a ticket on another Airline. ASAP Airlines will take off right away, as most of the customers want”.

 I went to the “ASAP Airlines” desk, bought my ticket and went to the gate. The minute I arrived, they let me board, and they closed the door, and we are on our way. I was very glad that I didn't miss any extra time. The plane was more than half-empty, and I could stretch my legs, no one was sitting next to me.

 After about 3 hours, the airplane started to descend. I asked the flight attendant what is going on. “We need to land to refuel. We didn’t calculate the fuel right, so we need more”. We landed to refuel, and after 1.5 hours, we are back on our way.

 After another 2 hours, the airplane started descending once again. I asked the flight attendant why we were descending again. “We have more passengers who would like to fly with us, so we will land to pick them up and continue on our way”. Many people were coming on board. The airplane is now full and crowded. After another 2 hours, we took off again on our way.

After 3 hours, we descended again. I asked what the reason is now? “We are understaffed and need more flight attendants to serve all the additional passengers.”

I’m sure that none of us would want to use the “ASAP Airlines” service. Arriving back home on time mattered the Most!

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Do not worry. I made up this story. ASAP Airlines does not exist. The execution faults, unfortunately, that we have in this story are leading many projects to fail.

We are pushed to start our projects as soon as we can. Not setting clear goals, agreed documented requirements, and validating critical assumptions. We commit to the timeline our stakeholders set for us, and we start our project. Executing without all the needed information, project schedule and risk planning, led us to stop and “refuel”.

The customers ask for more content, we add additional scope (“more passengers”), stay with the same committed date and do not take the time to assess what that additional scope does to our timeline, risk level and resource plan.

Later, we understand that we need more resources to deliver the current scope on a constrained timeline, so we stop and look for more “flight attendants ”.

I made up the ASAP Airlines story to help project teams who struggle with stakeholders who push them to start project execution ASAP. A Good analogy can many times help us explain why we need to avoid “violating” project management best practices.

No one will want to be an ASAP Airlines customer. This is why we need to make sure we will not execute like them.

On Time Delivery Matters - the Most!