Time Effect on Project Planning and

Budgeting

‘Jide Onademuren

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Project Planning and Budgeting

A project is identified, resources allocated and work happens

Project moves through a time process from requirements, design, development, testing to deployment

What happens during this “time process” makes a project looks like a success or failure

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Planning and Budgeting; Effect of Time

Uncertainty Planning Fallacy Expert Opinion Trust Information Flow

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Planning and budgeting outlines how much a project will cost and how much effort will be required for delivery

Planning and budgeting are subject to predictable amounts of uncertainty

This occurs at various stages and time of project lifecycle

When the number of decisions about planning and budgeting over time increases, uncertainty level is reduced and accuracy increases

Uncertainty

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The Cone of Uncertainty

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It is the tendency to underestimate how long or time required to complete a task even when there is experience of similar tasks

Individuals or organizations can be affected Most times planning fallacy is about personal

interests The project manager/organization believes that

planning and budgeting should be set in a way too hard to achieve

There is the belief that it will bring better productivity or completion of project fast enough

Planning Fallacy

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Team members can also be pessimist Afraid to plan and budget They also have the fear of failure or

inefficiency When new, neutral and additional resources

who have no personal interests are brought in, planning fallacy is eliminated

This action also enforces independent and consensus-oriented planning and budgeting

Planning Fallacy (Cont’d)

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The opinion of an expert can be required when it comes to determining how long a project might take

The expert relies on his intuition or gut feel and provides an estimate

Typically, he reads project details, ask one or two clarifying questions and then gives an estimate

However, from agile project planning and budgeting deals with functionalities(user stories)

These user stories require a variety of skills normally performed by more than one person

Expert Opinion

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This makes it difficult to find a suitable expert who can assess these skills across all disciplines

On the traditional approach, planning and budgeting is associated with a task which is performed by one person

A nice benefit of planning and budgeting by expert opinion is that it usually doesn’t take long

Studies have shown that planning and budgeting is more accurate by expert opinion than other approaches

Expert Opinion (Cont’d)

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The frequency of reliable delivery of promised estimates builds trust between project owners and managers in planning and budgeting

Project owners are reluctant to make important decisions early in a project unless estimates in the past have proved trustworthy

Trust helps to make important prioritization and tradeoff decisions on time

Trust helps to decide how much of a feature to be developed Reliable planning and budgeting allows work at a sustainable

pace and less time is spent on highly unpredictable tasks

Trust

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Planning and budgeting conveys and describes one possibility of what may come to pass in the life of a project

They communicate and establish a set of baseline expectations

Far too often, a project is reduced to a single date and all assumptions and expectations that lead to the date are forgotten

Without additional information there is no way of determining the sufficiency and realistic status of planning and budgeting

Information Flow

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Time helps to describe what task will be completed at what period

Documents key assumptions Establishes an approach for how it will have

collaborative measurable progress When a continuous information flow is

established the confidence and conclusion that can be drawn from planning and budgeting is influenced

Information Flow (Cont’d)

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Thank You