The roles of statistics and planning tools in IT project management

Project management is typically a logistic challenge; including planning, coordinating, tracking and informing employees, suppliers, management, customers and other stakeholders. However in information technology the challenge normally comes not from complex logistics but from the quickly evolving technology that causes poor predictability of planned tasks. While one cannot improve the predictability of individual tasks, understanding statistics enables one to counter the effect of the poor predictability. This study describes how active planning techniques, some of which are counter intuitive, takes advantage of statistics, technical insight gained during the project, and early project's achievements to finish the project on time, on budget and on specifications.