A wise person I work with made this profound statement today.

You can release on time and still fail

There’s a notion out there that project managers only care about making the schedule.  While it’s easy to get fixated on it, the more I work on product releases the less I find myself caring about “the schedule.”

This doesn’t mean it’s not important to meet the dates we’ve committed to. If a release is off track, I’m more interested in constructing a realistic schedule everyone has confidence meeting versus whipping everyone into a frenzy to meet a date simply because it’s published on a schedule.

Sometimes I find that the project team loses sight of who the schedule is for. When things are going well on one of my  ...