Pawel Brodzinski points us to Joel Spolsky's entry on Evidence Based Scheduling. I have to chuckle a bit inside. The concept of Integrated Master Plan / Integrated Master Schedule, our own Deliverables Based Planning(sm), and the guidance found in US Department of Defense, US Department of Energy, and some other federal and state project management guidebooks mandate measures of Physical Percent Complete at the Work Package level. These measures must be connected to the Technical Performance Measures and describe the tangible evidence that progress is being made against the plan.
This means that the plan must say several things:
- What level of technical performance should the product or service be at at this point in the schedule? Preliminary means we have a pretty good idea about what it should look like, but still have work to do. Final means we're done. Attributes like that. In the IMP/IMS world the verbs are restricted to a specific set, so everyone knows what we mean when we say Preliminary.
- What is the evidence that we're at some level of maturity? This evidence has to be tangible, visible, and confirmed in units of measure meaningful to the customer.
What is great about Joel's post is the principles of "Evidence Based Planning" are in full use inside Federal Government Agencies - DoD and DOE are my direct experiences.
So from one of the thought leaders in software development (Joel) comes confirmation that what we've been doing for the past decade is beginning to be put to use outside our programs.
