Studies suggest that more than 50% of project estimations totally miss the mark. But how does that happen? And more importantly, what can we do with it?
“When it comes to estimating errors for budget and schedule, the primary driver is complexity,” says Kerry Wills, PMP, a core committee volunteer for the Practice Standard for Project Estimating. To minimize errors, “treat estimating as a living process and not a one-time event,” he recommends.
Easier said than done!
Today, we’ll discuss the so-called “unplanned work” that creeps in to ruin our project schedules and the mindset that can help you create realistic plans hands down.
What Is Unplanned Work, and Where Does It Come From?
“The work is never just the work,” Dave Stewart, a tech whiz, entrepreneur, and blogger, justly noted when he got to do 73% of the extra work on a seemingly simple project.
After a detailed postmortem, he realized that most of these unplanned moments were “work to do the work” instead of the “actual” work.
Well, yes, any project is a bit more than just coding, writing, or designing; there’s behind-the-scenes stuff that needs to happen: meetings, planning, revisions, and other little tasks that seem minor but add up fast.
Unplanned work also includes tasks, activities, or changes that arise unexpectedly during the course of a project and are not included in the initial project plan or scope.
Dave split them up into eight groups, but we’ll go with three for simplicity:
The work before the work encompasses the preliminary efforts that set the stage for actual project execution.
Before any project can kick off, you have to address a myriad of administrative tasks, like conducting meetings, organizing reviews, and picking the right management tools.
If we speak about a software development project, the team may also spend weeks coordinating schedules for stakeholders, aligning project goals, and establishing communication protocols.
Once you finish the administrative work, you need to obtain resources to move forward. This means conducting experiments, scoping out requirements, quoting vendors, and pitching ideas to stakeholders.
Next comes preparation, perhaps the most critical phase of “the work before the work.” It involves configuration, setup of tools and services, establishing the infrastructure necessary for project execution, and so on.
Even using the simplest software, you’ll have to configure user roles, migrate existing data, and train your staff.
Sounds huge, doesn’t it? So, how do we fail to account for all these things in our estimations? There are two main reasons: cognitive biases and poor operational practices.
Many overly optimistic managers and even CEOs have an inherent tendency to believe that things will go smoothly no matter how complex the project is. They assume that all necessary resources and information are readily available, which results in inadequate preparation estimates.
Next, we often prioritize deliverables and end results, focusing on execution rather than the groundwork needed to achieve these. That’s the result, not the effort we are paid for, after all.
As for the processes, in organizations where departments operate independently, communication gaps can lead to a lack of understanding about the preparatory work that other teams undertake or require.
And if, during previous projects, we did not document the preparatory work or its impact on timelines, we don’t have any reference point for estimating similar tasks.
Then we remember how tight the project timeline is, try to rush through the planning phase, and realize that without the initials, we will end up with nothing but wasted time and resources.
The work within the work lies beneath the visible project deliverables and has three dimensions: the work around the work, the work beyond the work, and the work outside the work.
The work around the work is made of iterations, the repetitive cycles of development (or other product creation processes), where teams refine and improve their output. IT includes debugging, refactoring, maintenance, and tooling, for example.
This iterative process can be time-consuming but is essential for delivering a high-quality product.
The work beyond the work refers to making changes in the final product. These may mostly include modifications and scope creep.
Consider a marketing team tasked with launching a new product campaign. Initially, they outline a clear set of deliverables. However, as the project progresses, stakeholders request additional features—like enhanced graphics or social media integration—that were not part of the original plan.
These nice-to-haves lead to stretching the team’s resources and project timeline.
And last but not least, the work outside the work. No one is proof against unforeseen issues, like equipment failures, resigning employees, stakeholder disputes, etc.
These challenges often require immediate attention, developing contingency plans, and securing additional funding.
Now, let’s try to understand why this definitely important work is so often overlooked or underestimated.
Apart from the optimism bias we already discussed, we can blame poor risk assessment and organizational culture specifics.
When risk assessment is not properly done, potential sources of unplanned work may go unnoticed. Thus, estimation factors ideal conditions without accounting for potential disruptions or challenges.
Besides that, in some, let’s say, obsolete organizational cultures, admitting that unplanned work exists is a sign of weakness and unprofessionalism, so employees intentionally exclude or diminish it in estimates.
The work after the work. You are very wrong if you think the project is complete when the product is. The tasks that arise post-launch are as important as the ones you addressed during other project stages. However, they are often unexpected.
In software development, users or stakeholders may encounter issues or have questions that weren’t anticipated during development. Then, support tickets would flood in, requiring immediate attention from the team. The deployment rarely goes as planned, too.
Issues like server outages, performance bottlenecks, or configuration errors can spoil anything from a marketing campaign to a training course kick-off.
User feedback may highlight issues or suggest improvements that require immediate changes and come as a surprise to a team who believed they had completed their tasks.
So, how do we fail to estimate all this again? In most cases, we don’t, but the lack of data added to focus on ideal scenarios and time pressure too often prevents us from doing it right.
Putting an End to Project Estimation Mistakes
The main problem with unplanned work is that there’s much advice on handling it and too little on avoiding it. Even Scrum just recommends leaving some free capacity in each sprint for the unexpected. Other approaches are based on tripling and even quadrupling initial estimates.
Let’s try to look at it a bit differently. Whatever project estimation technique you use, there might be blind spots in our project estimations.
All you can do is run an audit and carefully quantify how much time your projects take in the longer term.
Here’s a quick checklist to help you do it and simple tips for those who are already using or plan to use project management automation tools like actiTIME:
1. Analyze what’s already done.
- Review past projects to identify common failings. Compare original estimates against your plans.
- Identify deviation areas and generalize your insights to detect generic patterns.
- Document your findings.
actiTIME tip: Use the Estimated vs Actual Time Report to calculate the variance between your initial estimates and the actual number of hours spent on various project tasks.
2. Determine causes of failure.
- Assess your current planning processes for shortcomings.
- Evaluate team skills and identify potential gaps.
- Examine communication practices for effectiveness and clarity.
- Find out which issues had the most impact on the final project outcome.
actiTIME tip: Track time, cost, and billing budgets to detect when things go wrong. Use the Time Track in Detail Report to visualize the time spent by each user on each task and the comments they might have had to find the tasks that turned out to be especially difficult.
3. Implement changes.
- Take measures (based on your findings) to enhance future estimation accuracy.
- Start monitoring project progress on a daily basis.
- Schedule regular reviews of estimation processes to ensure ongoing refinement.
actiTIME tip: Track each ongoing task’s progress against the estimated time on a visual timeline to identify and address an issue before it escalates.
To learn more about using actiTIME for accurate estimations, get on to this article.
Alternatively, you can start your free actiTIME 30-day trial and see everything for yourself.
May your estimates be as accurate as a well-tuned clock!
