I often find myself reading 'old' (15+ years) books on planning, Government and NGO working group papers on Major capital projects / Project Management (PM), jo

I often find myself reading 'old' (15+ years) books on planning, Government and NGO working group papers on Major capital projects / Project Management (PM), journal articles on various PM topics, and sometimes it feels as if very little material progress has been made in the discipline since the 70's. If anything, our propensity for relying on technology to 'take care' of particular parts in some cases takes us backwards. As someone who schedules and oversees complex programes and their governance for (most of) their living, a few observations that are common across all domains: - We are still very bad at understanding the total scope of work (whether it has been done before or not) - We are still very bad at understanding the work that must be done to deliver that scope (whether it has been done before or not) - We are still very bad at understanding how long it takes to do the work, especially if the work is more cerebral (whether it has been done before or not) - We still think we can predict the future with certainty with enough information - Things are becoming more complex and (perhaps) more uncertain - We are still bad at making decisions and usually avoid them, or make them without giving proper thought to their consequences A schedule's value is not just in '''predicting''' an end date. A schedule primarily does three things: Past / Status / Forecast - It records work/effort in the past - It gives you the status against plan - It forecasts the likely times when future work will take place and the amount of work left to complete the project This in term serves multiple project stakeholders in different ways. Leaders want to be able to budget, because the cost of money can be more or less expensive at different times. The cost of resources can be more or less expensive at different times. Workers want to know what they should be doing and how long they have to do it. Managers need to balance limited resources and (re)direct effort. Even with risk and resource loaded probabilistic scheduling with tens of thousands of montecarlo iterations, your actual path is still only one of those possible realities. But as in all models, there are sensitivities and if properly constructed understanding the sensitivities in the precedence graph is sometimes as important as calculating the critical path.