Building Contingency into Project Plans

Posted by Rich Crowley in IT, Project Management

Building a project plan with no contingency metrics (for budget and timeline) is foolish. Yet PM’s do it all the time, this one included. Why? It can only lead to expanding budgets and timelines for projects unless they are almost completely understood at the time of the original estimate, which is almost never.

By definition, a project is a unique undertaking. If it wasn’t unique, it would be operations and hence understood and repeatable. This uniqueness translates into uncertainty and risk, both of which need to be factored into any project plan in the form of contingency metrics. I’m doing some investigations currently on how to build contingency into projects and will publish more once I have put it all together.