We often pick an engineering task on the project plan that is about two months in the future, and ask the Project Manager: "How confident are you that this task will be completed on budget and on-time?"  Invariably the answer is 50% or less.  Too often, it is less then 20%.

Corporations have invested heavily  in project management.  Best practices from the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBoK) are taught across the world, and sophisticated enterprise software tools allow us to create plans and track performance for complex projects.

Let's face it, Project Management is a tool at the service of Executives and Project Managers.  Driven by tracking, reporting and cost accounting needs, it's focus is on estimates, milestones, synthetic progress reports.  There is nothing wrong with that! We need it. 

But Project Management is less and less a process at the service of engineering development work.  To young engineers entering the work force in the last 10 years, planning equates with project management processes.  It is not something they do.  It's something others do for you. 

As Project Management methods have matured, and become codified in the enterprise, engineers plan their own work less and less!  Here's a sampling of what engineers tell us as we start a new engagement:

• “Often the plan on the paper is not what we actually plan to do.”
• “The plan used by the PM is for tracking progress, it is heavily composed of milestones. Engineers often have a different plan for how we will do the work.”
• “We were given a budget (for this task), and as long as we do not exceed it we don't really have to plan in details”
• “We really get into detailed planning only when we start overrunning or being very late.”
• “I stop work on the task when my budget runs out”

The problem is NOT with the Project Management Process.  It does NOT need to change.  

But the project management process does not fit the need of managing the daily work of engineers within each individual task in the project plan.  Project managers must be able to count on engineers to deliver these tasks. 

KTS creates an engineering planning culture: in your company:

• Engineering issues will arise.  It is part of the engineer's world.
• Engineers learn to plan for work they have never done, taking guess work out of it.
• The engineering team constantly looks for what can go wrong, and readjust how work is done to avoid it, on a weekly or even daily basis. 
• Engineers live with evolving specifications while meeting overall task schedule and cost commitment.
• Constant re-planning, as a matter of course. 

The answer is not more process, more tools, more tracking.  It takes a culture change within engineering.