The original deadline for our software project had come and gone, and every week the new finish date was sliding farther into the future. The Vice President of Development decided that he needed to call a project summit meeting, bring the finish date in sooner, and nail down a schedule once and for all. He called all the important managers (but none of the programmers) into a room. They shut the door and vowed not to emerge until they had shortened the schedule.

One of the managers laid a rock on the table, solemnly turned it over, and said they should “leave no stone unturned” in their effort to shave time off the schedule. They re-examined each task in the project list, shortened many of them, made some tasks concurrent, and eliminated a few others. They emerged several hours later with a tightened schedule, and an earlier end date.

All the managers were happy. They had accomplished their goal of shortening the schedule.

In hindsight, it is not surprising what happened: The managers’ effort was a waste of time. The new schedule had no effect on the pace of development at all. The project was finished at the about the same time it would have been, except that five or six highly paid resources wasted a half-day looking at a rock in a room.

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