Licences and long timescales

ByElizabeth Harrin Last updated: Research & Case Studies

Touching wood last week must have worked as lo and behold, after a few days of stamping my feet in a Gallic way my licences have arrived. And I already have one very happy client holding meetings with our Australian office, albeit rather cruelly on a Friday morning. Which is 6.30 pm Oz-time, when our Antipodean colleagues would no doubt rather be doing something else than having e-conferences with HQ. So the project moves on to its next dilemma:  how to rollout this software to 100,000 staff around the globe when I have no means of installing it on the PC’s of anyone who sits more than 100m from me.
That’s next month’s problem though. The current issue of the day is the fact that my database upgrade project is one of those where management, rather than logical planning, has set the timescales. The delivery date is the beginning of July, although the plans say we will deliver something into prod 28 August. So I need to find a way to chop 2 months out of the plans without losing any of the scope or scrimping on quality. The traditional ways to do this are:

  • throw more money at the project to add additional resources
  • make existing resources work longer hours, by again throwing money at the problem.

My one development resource could be helped by another development resource who is unfortunately a good few hundred euros per day more expensive. It’s a big fat ‘non’ to spending more money.

The other, not so appealing, option is to sit down with my budget holder and sponsor and explain exactly why they can’t have a July delivery. Which is what I have planned for Wednesday. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Elizabeth Harrin wearing a pink scarf

Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years.
Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects.