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.

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