Project Management

Ask three agencies how long the same build will take and you can hear six weeks, five months and a year — and all three can be telling the truth. This guide explains why, and what a realistic schedule looks like: the five phases every build passes through, honest duration ranges from a six-week internal tool to a two-year regulated system, the factors that genuinely lengthen a build, how estimates are produced and why they slip, the delays nobody writes into the plan, a week-by-week schedule for a typical six-month departmental system, what safely compresses a date and what only appears to, and the questions that reveal whether a delivery date has any evidence behind it.