Manufacturing by Paul Templin

Industrial Engineer's quarterly column about lean manufacturing (November 2011) 

Unrealistic expectations

In today’s fast-paced world economy, the “customer” often drives project schedules. Time to market is king. And bottom-up schedules based on estimates of resources and critical path activities often are completed after the fact and adjusted as necessary to meet top-down schedules. The result is a situation where “customer expectations are sometimes set too high or are dangerously out of alignment with where the delivery team can go on the solution implementation,” according to Brad Egeland’s “Project Managers’ Top Ten Challenges” on the Project Management Tips blog. “It is never fun heading into [the] project meeting being forced to worry about damage control before the engagement [has] even begun.” Some euphemistically call these compressions “success-based schedules.”