Do you have any idea about plans?
Have you ever experienced a project that didn't meet the end date?

Spot on. Every plan I was ever involved with had to hope that nothing went wrong.

Every plan I had to make was always squeezed (after lots of rework) to be done as fast as possible - or, as the mgmt would prefer, even faster than that. It would always be the absolute optimum way, with no slack whatsoever.

And yet, things would still go wrong, and the plans would have to adapt. They'd use the slack that wasn't there, and so go late.

Always.

The marketing department would moan. But telling the customer would always be the last thing anyone wanted to do.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Perhaps the answer is two assume worst case scenario and just give an end date of 2018 for the commercial roll-out.

I believe that to be totally wrong, this is just one Huge gravy train for contractors, not only should any date given stand but there should be penalty clauses already in place.

so they give a blanket date and run it out as ling as they like?

and hide all the failaments!

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Perhaps the answer is two assume worst case scenario and just give an end date of 2018 for the commercial roll-out.

Which would be commercial suicide from the marketing side. They need everyone to believe it is just around the corner, so they don't just give up and go to Virgin.

At least that's how marketers think. I'm an engineer, and I'd prefer the plain truth... and that appears to be closer to what Openreach is giving us now - if you go via email.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Perhaps the answer is two assume worst case scenario and just give an end date of 2018 for the commercial roll-out.

Which would be commercial suicide from the marketing side. They need everyone to believe it is just around the corner, so they don't just give up and go to Virgin.

At least that's how marketers think. I'm an engineer, and I'd prefer the plain truth... and that appears to be closer to what Openreach is giving us now - if you go via email.

Shame that VM cable isn't available to more people it's foot print is small in comparison to BT 's Maybe if there was better competition Openwound would be inclined to get it's finger out and do some graft for once , As it is so up it's self because it's complacent , and why should the government fund a private company to roll out Fibre , basically catch up with other European countries , if that private company has allowed it's infrastructure to become outdated, this FTTC rollout should of been completed at least 10yrs ago

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Plenty of other projects have had dates slip or never announced dates. Where do I start?

Very true, not that many have had a series of placeholder dates.

I suspect people would far rather Openreach provide a date and if they don't achieve it then provide a realistic alternative date rather than simply pushing back to the next placeholder, rinsing and repeating ad infinitum.

No data is better than misleading data.

I can't comment that much on other areas but certainly in my own the management of the project is a farce. The PM seems to have no idea what's going on. This isn't a small area or a single town, it's 6 exchanges covering over 100,000 premises.

No plan should be based on the hope that nothin goes wrong if it does it is very poor planning indeed. All plans also should include some contingency

You seem to work to the same strange planning sysytem that BT use. Belive it or not thousands of far more difficult and complet projects are delivered to plan and timescale and budget by other companies so why does BT find the reasonably simple task of installing the Cabinets abd exchange equipment so difficult that many are 2 years behind sechedule?

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

No plan should be based on the hope that nothin goes wrong if it does it is very poor planning indeed. All plans also should include some contingency

Have you ever experienced a project that didn't meet the end date? What happened?

Most commmercial projects have penalty clauses that kick in if you miss them

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

why does BT find the reasonably simple task of installing the Cabinets abd exchange equipment so difficult that many are 2 years behind sechedule?

Because it's not simple.