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Delivering a project on time is essential in today's business world. There are three techniques one can utilize to ensure a project is completed on time. The first involves planning before a project begins. Once the project gets underway, its important to review the progress and make adjustments as necessary. Finally, one should develop a knowledge base to use on future projects.

The first technique is planning. It's human nature to be overly optimistic when planning. To reduce this tendency, one should break the project into smaller phases. Each phase's time of completion can then be estimated individually. In determining the completion times, the estimator can utilize past experience, input from those who will be performing the work, and allow more seasoned estimators to review their work. Once each phase has been estimated, review the overall time to completion. If it doesn't meet the customer's needs, investigate the assumptions of each phase. The final step of planning is to set milestones for the completion of each phase.

Once the project begins, it's important to review the project's progress at the completion of each phase. This allows for adjustments to be made to keep the project on schedule. These adjustments could be assigning more resources to get the project back on track or freeing up resources if the project is ahead of schedule. It's also important to communicate to your customer if there was an unforeseen delay which could not have been reasonably expected. Most contracts will allow for adjustment in completion time and cost if this situation arises.

Finally, its important to document the causes for missing or exceeding a milestone. Not only to document unforeseen delays, but also to use this knowledge for future projects.

In conclusion, the planning by phase process allows the estimator to estimate smaller projects. This will reduce the potential to be overly optimistic. It also allows the estimator to set milestones which can be used to review the progress during the project. Adjustments can be made during the project if the milestones aren't being achieved. Finally, through documentation, the estimator develops a better understanding of the processes which will make future projects easier to estimate.

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