Do you follow Project Management ‘religiously’ ?
Project Management is perhaps one of the most fiercely debated and grossly misunderstood disciplines in the software field currently, hence let me throw in a disclaimer first: if you are a small team of experts and/or people well-known to each other (e.g., have worked together as a team earlier), and situated in a collocated fashion, doing a lot of ‘creative work’ that can’t be very ‘accurately’ scoped, let alone managed; you probably will find ideas of formal project management a huge overkill (on time, effort, money and might even seem to stifle creativity), and you might be better off considering ‘lightweight’ methods like Agile Project Management / Scrum in the context of software development (well, nothing stops you from deploying pieces of Agile / Scrum in a non-software context - it is based on common sense after all). Small...
PRINCE2 handles Project Tolerances better
Most project management frameworks and methods advocate (and actually require) ‘point-estimates’ in planning and scheduling. By ‘point-estimates’, I mean there is a ‘hard number’ that seems to be etched in stone, leaving with no ‘tolerance’ or ‘leeway’ for the project manager and his team. Even though we all understand that estimates are never point-estimates (and hence the project commitments are never a point-commitment), we still expect a firm estimate (and consequently a firm commitment) from a project manager. For example, a given feature must be required by 23-June, but there is no recognition of the fact that 23-June might still be a couple of months away, and several things could go wrong or could change meanwhile thus affecting the validity of this date. In real-life, there are always tolerances, some allowable, some acceptable, some tolerable and some simply unacceptable. This is not limited to...