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Hi. My name is Alan Zucker.
I'm the curator of
the Project Management
Principles program
for Henry Stewart Talks.
I have over 25 years of
experience managing projects and
project management organizations
in Fortune 100 companies.
I live outside Washington, DC,
and teach at the University of
Virginia, University of Georgia,
and work with several leading
international project
management training companies.
In today's session, we will
continue our discussion around
project scheduling and
we will talk about
the Milestone-Kanban
scheduling technique.
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In our last session,
we talked about the
traditional ways of
developing a project schedule
using a Gantt chart.
That technique works well
when our tasks are well-defined.
We can reasonably estimate
the durations and understand
the relationship
between the tasks.
However, for a lot of
the things that we do,
it's really hard to have
those things understood at
the beginning and
it makes it very
difficult to put together
a project schedule.
Not long ago I developed
this hybrid project
scheduling technique
that I called
Milestone-Kanban technique.
This is optimized
for knowledge work.
Works very well when
the deliverables or the
major milestones are known.
But we're really not
sure about the tasks or
the durations or
the relationship
between the various activities.
For example, we know that
a deliverable is due
next month around the
middle of the month
but we're not sure
how long it's going
to take to do that.
Say we're writing a
report. Writing a report
could take a couple
of hours of work, may
take several hours to
get it reviewed and
those things can be delayed
based on people's availability.
We really can't estimate
those things very well.
But we know what we need to
do, when it needs to be done.
Here we will borrow from
our traditional project
scheduling practices
of understanding
our deliverables.
But then we will use
agile techniques to
actually manage the
execution of the tasks.
