The end of the first month is in sight and I already know that I'm going to miss at least a few of the milestones in my plan.
This is pretty embarrassing for a business that specialises in project management. Fortunately I send out a reporting pack each month and this forces me to be honest about slips and take a look at the root cause.
In this case it's mostly pretty benign. I did two weeks of additional work to ensure a graceful exit from my previous job. Overall that has put me roughly a week behind, but covers about 4 weeks worth of expenses for the company. On balance it was a good trade.
The other factor is that I chose to work on and release the milestone tracker. Whoops - that would be unplanned scope creep. It has given me a couple of benefits, putting my marketing plan ahead of schedule and debugging some technical issues. As marketing remains my highest risk item I think this was also a good trade, but I made the decision to go ahead on the basis that it wouldn't slip my other milestones. The lesson to learn here is that the unplanned work should get done last in a reporting period, not first!
For me the biggest positive is that I know how far behind schedule I am and why it has happened. I haven't spent hours watching TV at home when there is no boss looking over my shoulder - although if I ever think that's becoming a danger there is always Rescue Time to turn to.
The only question left is what do I do now? Do I change the schedule to show the slip or not?
In this case I think I need to - thinking I can recover the lost week would force me to cut a corner somewhere and it's better to have a realistic plan that's useful than always be scrambling to catch up with fiction. However because I'm using the milestone tracker to keep an eye on progress I get to always see progress in the context of the project baseline (the original planned dates) in a handy visual form - there's an example of how this works here.
Back to the salt mines - lots of work to do!
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