Unrealistic Project Schedules

What makes a project successful, the answer is "a realistic schedule". But does anyone knows what are the characteristics of a realistic schedule?

A realistic schedule:

• Includes a detailed knowledge of the work to be done.
• Has tasks sequences in correct order
• Accounts for external constraints beyond the control of the team
• Can be accomplished on time given the availability of sufficiently skilled and enough resources.

Finally, a realistic schedule takes into consideration all the objectives of the project. For example, a schedule may be just right for the project team, but if it misses the customer's completion date, then it's clear that the whole project will need reassessment. Building a project plan that includes all the necessary parts and achieves a realistic balance among cost, scheduling, and quality requires a careful, step by step process.

But question comes why most of the project managers keep on revising their schedules and submitting the recovery plans throughout the project life cycle.

Following are 3 main reasons to this problem.

1. The project manager's inability to understand the technical complications in the project due to lack of experience, technical knowledge of the project.
2. Weak project managers who are always looking to make customers or their management happy and unable to defend their point of in front of their higher management.
3. The management itself who only knows the language of money this fact is little bit commendable as this happens if unsuitable people without proper knowledge manage to acquire higher positions and they influence the project managers for unrealistic schedule compression without giving proper resources, remove the resources from the project just to save few 100K dollars.

But the fact is all of these reasons make the project land up with lower profit margins, severe losses and LD penalties from the customer.