Take No Small Slips

If you are getting behind schedule and need additional time resources, then take one large planned slip instead of allowing yourself to nickel and dime yourself to death with small, unanticipated slips.undefined

To be applied before

 * Named Stable Bases is an input for Take No Small Slips.

Alternatives

 * see also Completion Headroom and Recommitment Meeting.

Contents of following sections belong to the original Organizational Patterns website and have been divided into following parts: Context, Problem, Solution, Discussion.

Context
...development is under way and progress must be tracked, avoiding major surprises to both the customer and the enterprise.

Problem
It’s difficult to know how long a project should take, and even more difficult to recover when one guesses wrong.

If you guess pessimistically, developers become complacent, and you miss market windows. If you guess optimistically, developers become burned out, and you miss market windows. Projects without schedule motivation tend to go on forever, or spend too much time polishing details that are either irrelevant or don’t serve customer needs.

Solution
Prefer a single large slip to several small slips. ([Brooks1995], page 24.)

"We found a good way to live by ‘Take no small slips’ from The Mythical Man Month. Every week, measure how close the critical path (at least) of the schedule is doing. If it’s three days beyond schedule, track a ’delusion index’ of three days. When the delusion index gets too ludicrous, then slip the schedule. This helps avoid churning the schedule." — Personal discussion with Paul Chisholm, June, 1994.

Discussion
This helps support a project with a flexible target date.

Dates are always difficult to estimate; De Marco notes that one of the most serious signs of an organization in trouble is a schedule worked backward from an end date [DeMarco1993].

A single large slip is important for the morale of the team. If you continually take small slips, nobody believes the schedule any more. This hurts morale, the sense of urgency fades, and people stop caring. On the other hand, a single large slip preserves at least some of the believability of the schedule, and people are more willing to work toward the revised schedule.

Much of the rationale is supported in the MIT project management simulation; the Borland Quattro Pro for Windows case study; and from Brooks’ seminal work [Brooks1995].

Most sane projects manage this way.

See also Recommitment Meeting.