As project leaders we naturally have a gut feel around things that can and will go wrong - which requires contingencies so that when they do go wrong it doesn’t impact the end date.
The problem with these contingencies is they can make the now, quite reasonable, plan look a bit… underwhelming. We are baking in little delays which we can see coming, but to someone unfamiliar with technology development these just look like we’re taking longer to get it done.
This is where you can write the exec a best case plan. This is a surprisingly easy to formulate plan which shows every task sequenced back-to-back without risk of it going wrong incorporated, designed to show the potential best case end-date should absolutely nothing go wrong.
While this might give a hope for an earlier release date, it is obtuse in showing how volatile such a date is by removing subjectiveness of risk likelihood all together. In the best case plan some traffic causing a key person to be late to work pushes the whole plan back 3 hours, a distraction for something more operationally urgent - days of delay. The whole point is that if this is the perfect plan, we can all agree the realistic plan is certainly landing later.
Whereas the original plan might have safety ‘task spread’ zones, the size of these (in terms of project delay) can always be (fairly) challenged as too risk adverse, or not ambitious enough. The goal is to collectively conclude that the plan assuming zero problems is ridiculous and we need some level of contingency added, but in my experience this feels more acceptable by all put at the end (in case we can’t be as ambitious as the business thinks we can be), rather than spread throughout (where it feels more like we’re planning for failure).
Final point of warning - don’t fall into the trap of mis-labelling it a ‘best effort’ or ‘ambitious plan’ - that suggests some kind of confidence or ‘go-getting’. The best case plan we can all agree on because it is nothing but the detail sandwiched together back to back - there’s no ambiguity or promise to hold on to.
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