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Track 2000
There's more - project risk changes everything as well
As discussed by Thomsett [op cit], project risk is a structured assessment of the factors that will influence the cost, effort and potential success of a project. Typical risk factors include system or product size, level of innovation, team skills, business client participation and support, development platforms and so on.
Research by Jones [op cit] and others has shown that there is a direct correlation between project risk and estimation accuracy. Simply, high risk projects have lower cost estimation accuracy and experience higher degrees of schedule slippage than lower risk projects.
A project tracking report for a low risk project that indicates that the team is 30% over budget and 2 months behind schedule has completely different implications for the project manager and executives than a high risk project [of a similar size] that is 30% over budget and 2 months behind schedule.
In the case of the low risk project, the report is indicating serious problems whereas for the high risk project the report could be indicating that the project is performing normally for high risk projects.
While the concept of a project being behind schedule and over budget being considered acceptable may still upset some senior managers, the cases discussed above should have made the point.