The most important aspect in creating a schedule that does not make the fiction “best seller” list is to ensure that it is thorough in content and predecessor expectations. A schedule that does not include everything that will occur, or must occur, will never be factual. We all know this; the challenge is routinely attaining the necessary level of detail that will produce predictable design projects. Following are my three favorite solutions to schedule inaccuracies.

Make no Assumptions
As soon as assumptions creep into the task breakdown process, tasks that should be managed to closure become non-issues and fall off the list. One of the largest offenders for misplaced assumptions are tasks related to the design tools themselves. If tool and flow development or validation tasks are not part of the project they will not be properly managed, and if they are not managed they will not be in place when the project needs them. When identifying tool activities for a project consider model gaps (temp, voltage, mismatch), newer flow steps, new device structures and new top level validation methods. In addition to tools keep an eye out for other areas where an invalid assumption about the status of a required deliverable to the project will jeopardize your schedule accuracy.

Say what you Need
The primary consideration when building a schedule is that every owner of a task is clear about what they need. One of my simple rules of engineering management is “Leave no room for ambiguity or interpretation in your requirements for success. Say what you need”. When applied to a task in a schedule it means the task owner must be clear and concise about what they need for optimal success on the task, the success factors. Anything less and the upstream tasks or predecessors will not be defined to produce the required deliverables, leaving the current task without its required success factors.

Find what you do not know
Finding what you don’t know is about making sure you have identified all the activities that must be included to produce a predictable workflow. All the essential tasks to accomplish this are not necessarily obvious to the team as a whole, dictating the need for some background work to bring them up to the surface. The process of finding the unknowns in your design workflow can be reviewed in one of our earlier newsletters that discusses formal discovery. Leaving out quality time to find what you don’t know, prior to schedule building, will be certain to add a level of unpredictability to your project .