This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
"The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it." - Franklin P. Jones
Project schedules that rely on interim task due dates and the calendar to assess and manage progress against promises set up a whole series of opportunities to be unappreciated. If the person that is going to use your outputs in their task focuses on the due date/start date as the border between the two tasks rather than the handoff itself, then if you are early in delivery, odds are they'll use the extra time for other work, squandering the extra time that you've provided to the project. As a result, your expeditious delivery is, in the end, unappreciated. As a result, you start pacing your work to deliver to the date. As a result, projects managed in this way almost always take longer than they need to, and very often, longer than expected.
Prescription: Get out of the "project schedule as train schedule" mentality and into the "project as relay race" mode of operation, focusing on assuring that resources are there to pick up and run with the hand-offs as soon as they are ready instead of having hand-offs there when the resource plans to start.
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