Meeting Deadlines (Part 2)

Any project deadline can be met by introducing a "the developers just have to work more focused" factor (F).

For example, given the following:

• A 10 month project with 3 month (D) to go,
• 500 developer work hours (A) available each month,
• a remaining effort (R) of 3000 hours,
• a burn down chart showing that the remaining effort is reduced by 250 hours each month (V).

Based on this the following calculation shows that the project will not meet its deadline.

Dv = R/V = 3000/250 = 12 month > D

But as a project manager you should never trust in burn down charts. Instead always use the amount of developer time assigned to the project for your calculations. This leads to the following calculation:

Da = R/A = 3000/500 = 6 month > D

Still the deadline is not met. But there is hope. Tell your developers to "work more focused" and adjust that factor to what ever you need to meet your deadline. In our example:

Df = R/(A*F) = 3000/(500*2) = 3 month = D

As you can see after telling your developers to work only two times more focused (a reasonably small number) the project is right on schedule.