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Project tracking is a lie (in the waterfall)

Some time ago Dave Nicolette expressed so well something that I was aware of but could not formulate clearly. That is, in traditional waterfall projects the percent-completes are a lie; all they tell you is how much time is passed since the time the project started, and that is the only metric that a traditional project manager, armed with his shining copy of Microsoft Project, is tracking.

So please jump to Dave’s blog post and read about it!

This entry was posted on 5 November 2008 at 10:06 and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Project tracking is a lie (in the waterfall)”

  1. PM Hut Says:
    November 14th, 2008 at 03:52

    This is extremely correct, although I think it only applies to software projects (where Agile is ideal). In other types of predictable and traditional projects, percent complete really means percent complete, this is where Waterfall excels.

    I have published a long while ago a series of article about Inch Pebble Scheduling, where a task is a granular one (with a duration between 2 hours and 2 days) and its status can be either done or not done. Percent complete is irrelevant in this case.

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