Chicken (game) - Schedule Chicken & Project Management

Schedule Chicken & Project Management

The term "Schedule Chicken" is used in project management and software development circles. The condition occurs when two or more areas of a product team claim they can deliver features at an unrealistically early date because each assumes the other teams are stretching the predictions even more than they are. This pretense continually moves forward past one project checkpoint to the next until feature integration begins or just before the functionality is actually due.

The practice of "Schedule Chicken" often results in contagious schedules slips due to the inter-team dependencies and is difficult to identify and resolve, as it is in the best interest of each team not to be the first bearer of bad news. The psychological drivers underlining the "Schedule Chicken" behavior in many ways mimic the Hawk-Dove or Snowdrift model of conflict.

Read more about this topic:  Chicken (game)

Famous quotes containing the words chicken, project and/or management:

    Clogged and soft and sloppy eyes
    Have lost the light that bites or terrifies.
    There are no swans and swallows any more.
    The people settled for chicken and shut the door.
    Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

    Indigenous to Minnesota, and almost completely ignored by its people, are the stark, unornamented, functional clusters of concrete—Minnesota’s grain elevators. These may be said to express unconsciously all the principles of modernism, being built for use only, with little regard for the tenets of esthetic design.
    —Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    The Management Area of Cherokee
    National Forest, interested in fish,
    Has mapped Tellico and Bald Rivers
    And North River, with the tributaries
    Brookshire Branch and Sugar Cove Creed:
    A fishy map for facile fishery....
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)