from the editor The Nine Deadly Sins of Project Planning

t a time when some software organiza-tions have achieved close to perfect on-time delivery records,1 others con-tinue to suffer mediocre results. Sur-veys generally indicate that poor pro-ject planning is one of the top sources of problems. How can you recognize a badly planned software project? Here are nine of the dead-liest sins I’ve found in project plan-ning. 1. Not planning at all By far the most common plan-ning problem is simply not planning at all, and this sin is easily avoided. A person need not be an expert plan-ner to plan effectively. I’ve seen nu-merous instances of projects planned by rank amateurs that have run well simply because the people in charge had carefully considered their project’s specific needs. Forced to choose between an expert pro-ject planner who doesn’t carefully think through his plan or an amateur who has thoroughly eval-uated his project needs, I’ll bet on the amateur every time. 2. Failing to account for all project activities If Deadly Sin #1 is not planning at all, Deadly Sin #2 is not planning enough. Some project plans are created using the assumption that no one on the software team will get sick, attend training, go on vacation, or quit. Core activities are often underestimated to a great degree. Plans created using unrealistic assump-tions like these set up a project for disaster. There are numerous variations on this theme. Some projects neglect to account for ancillary activities such as the effort needed to create setup programs, convert data from pre-vious versions, perform cutover to new sys-tems, perform compatibility testing, and other pesky kinds of work that take up more time than we would like to admit. Some late projects propose to catch up by reducing their originally planned testing cycle; they reason that there probably won’t be very many defects to detect or correct. (I leave as an exercise for the reader to determine why—if this is really the case—they didn’t plan for a shorter testing cycle in the first place.) 3. Failure to plan for ris