Our Love Affair with Project Slack (and Why It Ruins Our Schedule Accuracy)1

Jeffrey K. Pinto, Kate Davis

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

One of the critical elements in project planning is the careful creation of the schedule, identifying all key activities, estimating time to completion, and laying out the activity network. As part of this process, human behaviors can play an important and often unhelpful role in distorting project plans. In this chapter, we examine one of the key behavioral challenges in project planning, the identification of activity durations and project team members' development of extra slack in the schedule. We argue that adding slack (extra time) to our activity duration estimates is a common behavior and occurs for a variety of reasons, most commonly due to the desire to protect ourselves from aggressive or unreasonable project schedules. Our desire to avoid looking bad motivates us to add a safety margin to our activity duration estimates. This chapter identifies some of the most common ways in which extra slack is inserted into individual's duration estimates and considers the implications of extra slack on creating accurate and reasonable project activity networks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationMastering Project Leadership
Subtitle of host publicationInsights from the Research
PublisherCRC Press
Pages93-98
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781040105146
ISBN (Print)9781032473321
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2024

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Economics, Econometrics and Finance
  • General Business, Management and Accounting
  • General Engineering
  • General Environmental Science

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