A Parable About Time

Suppose your car needs an oil change. You visit two garages on Monday looking for estimates. Garage One quotes $50; Garage Two quotes $50. Both say it takes two hours.

You leave your car at Garage One, go to a movie, and return two hours later to pay and drive away. Three months later you try Garage Two. You return from the movie. There’s an oil pan under your car. The mechanic is working the register.

“I need my car,” you say.

“It took an hour to prep and drain the oil,” the mechanic says as he rings up someone. “Now I’m on the register for the rest of the week. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the remaining hour.”

No one would accept this scheduling for a car. Why accept it in a project?

Relying on resource hours over task duration is one of my project management pet peeves. Methodologies that rely solely on resource hours don’t adequately predict when things will actually get done.

Managers and teams that go through our training get practical experience in the kind of scheduling that tells them when they can take the next step and when the job will be done – ahead of schedule, too. In project management, as in life, knowing how long a task takes – even a simple oil change – is insufficient. You need to know when you can drive your car.   It’s the only way to get anywhere, on the road or in your career.