Your Beautiful Timeline Is Useless When Reality Hits #wtf

It looks visually beautiful, but it’s hard to adjust when real-world conditions kick in.

Meanwhile, as a project manager or business analyst, especially in ERP implementation you have to face reality, not sell dreams.

You need to see: if one task goes well, what’s the impact on other tasks? And vice versa, if a task can’t be delivered on time, what will happen to the others?

You need to know which tasks can run in parallel, what requirements must be fulfilled to run them simultaneously, what benefits they bring, and whether the available resources are actually sufficient.

Sometimes we also need to expand a task to see the child tasks under it, or list all features and epics within that group, just to decide whether parallel execution is even possible.

We also need to assign weights to features or phases to measure actual project realization progress. Of course, this takes time especially if your timeline tool behaves more like a mockup design tool than a project management tool.

We also need to track plan versus realization. Why is this important? Because timeline adjustments usually happen at least three times:

• First: after the kickoff meeting or more precisely, after user requirements and BRD/FSD sign-off. Sometimes the project isn’t as difficult as the pre-sales team described during initiation. But sometimes it’s much harder. Lol. It gets even better when the sales team handing over the project barely understands how the system actually works or how resource allocation is really managed.
• Second: during development, or when customization is almost finished. If the timeline was too short or too tight, the team often doesn’t have enough time to deeply understand the actual business process in the field. Unfortunately, major issues or negative scenarios are sometimes only discovered during UAT. At that point, we need to adapt and embrace the situation. But before making any decision, we still need to adjust the timeline and forecast the impact on related features.
• Last: during data migration, user transition, or adaptation. Sometimes final master data or accounting cut-off data takes longer than promisedor longer than expected for various reasons. At this stage, the timeline must be adjusted, and of course, we also need to quickly calculate additional costs if the project duration is extended.

Now imagine your beautiful Gantt chart in FigJam, Figma, PowerPoint, or Canva.

Yes, it’s beautiful.

But in situations like these, what you need is real numbers and real projections not beautiful colors.

Because nightmare colors are always the same, dude:

Red and black.