The ship date predictor: Redux

Last year, I shared the ship date predictor. My colleague who created the chart contacted me last year and told me what happened when he tried to apply the ship date predictor to subsequent projects.

He discovered that “the rules for Windows 95 didn’t carry over, so my nomination for the Nobel Prize in Project Management was withdrawn.” He did find, interestingly, that each management team had its own consistent scheduling errors, so the chart was useful only in retrospect, revealing each management team’s individual error ratio.

My colleague continued tracking the data until the late 2000’s, at which time scheduling became more accurate and the exercise became uninteresting.

Happy 21st birthday, Windows 95.

Bonus chatter: My colleague also looked up the career of the person who wrote “Otherwise, I’ll be applying for a job at McDonalds.” According to LinkedIn, that person left Microsoft in 2000 and now works at another major technology company. (Not McDonalds.)