Posted on 28 May 2004 under General

I have a rule of thumb for determining how much undetected slippage will occur for any task. Its pretty high-tech and may challenge those of you who don’t have high-falutin university degrees.

The amount of undetected slippage that can occur on a task that was scheduled to take X, where X is in the range of one hour to one week, is X.

Pretty great eh? In other words if something is supposed to take a day and something goes wrong that causes the task to blow-out then, taking into account the realities of people and project dynamics, its likely that it won’t be until one day after the task was due to finish that it will be detected by “management”.

I know what you’re thinking. What about on a project with a daily progress meeting or one of those agile projects? I think the chances are that the slip still won’t be detected. People and group dynamics are just like that.