1) Based on your experience (or your research), why do you think scheduling issues often cause great concern for project managers?

2. The opening case describes Sue's tight timeline to successfully deliver an online registration system for a local college. There are several things that occurred that was arguably outside of Sue's control (disengaged college stakeholders, senior programmer quitting, etc.) However, there are certain steps Sue could have taken to promote the success of the project. In your opinion, what could Sue done differently?

hapter 6 OPENING CASE Sue Johnson was the project manager for a consulting company contracted to provide a new online registration system at a local college in nine months or less. This system had to be operational by May 1 so students could use it to register for the fall semester. Her company's contract had a stiff penalty clause if the system was not ready by then, and Sue and her team would get nice bonuses for doing a good job on this project and meeting the schedule. Sue knew that it was her responsibility to meet the schedule and manage scope, cost, and quality expectations. She and her team developed a detailed schedule and network diagram to help organize the project. Developing the schedule turned out to be the easy part; keeping the project on track was more difficult. Managing personnel issues and resolving schedule conflicts were two of the bigger challenges. Many of the college's employees took unplanned vacations and missed or rescheduled project review meetings. These changes made it difficult for the project team to follow the planned schedule for the system because the team had to have customer sign-off at various stages of the systems development life cycle. One senior programmer on Sue's project team quit, and she knew it would take extra time for a new person to get up to speed, especially since the exiting programmer did a poor job docu- menting how his code linked to other systems at the college. It was still early in the proj- ect, but Sue knew they were falling behind. What could she do to meet the operational date of May 1