Louis Ohland wrote:
I need to document a process. Up until now, they used a simple
timeline, but that was when there was 18 months to make it work. Now 18
weeks is a luxury (closer to 30 days, minus)

Which book is worth getting?

The direct title match books are from the 60s and 70s.
Gantt, PERT, CPM

I've worked on many projects that have severely missed their schedules,
and a few that came in within 10% of estimates.

The few had two factors in common:

1. They were tracked with Gantt charts.

2. _Everyone_, from the top of the management tree to the roots of the
worker-bee staff, respected the schedule. On the worker-bee end this
meant not overdoing your task and letting the project manager know when
things go awry. On the top-management end this means actually believing
that people whom you pay tons of money to be competent _are_ competent,
listening to what they say, and accepting that the impossible really
does take a bit of time. Of the two, the latter is more rare.

Gantt charts are close to intuitive, so those management books from the
60's and 70's are going to be perfectly good at filling in the gaps.

Management buy-in is rare.

You're talking about process, not projects, so the only thing I can add
is to draw a corollary to the "management buy-in" problem: don't
document the process times that _should_ exist; document the process
times that _do_ exist. If you start making it your business to shorten
up times, make plans based on the times that do exist while you're
expending effort on bringing the times in.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

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