I am currently working on a project with around 700 business requirements outlined in the contract that need to be discovered, built, and tested. We have broken these requirements out into stages that align with the general business flow of our client. In this particular wave, we will be tackling about 150 of these requirements.
My team of Implementation Specialists and Business Analysts just completed a 3-week onsite Discovery with our client where we observed their current operations. From there, I have charged them to build out a task list of configurations that are needed to satisfy all the requirements before we go back and demonstrate our first pass to the client and refine configurations.
In the schedule that I've built, there are a set of tasks that come after the configuration task list is built to rebaseline the amount of time that my team needs to complete these configurations. In the original schedule, I've given 20 days to complete configurations. However, I want this time address the risk of requirements being more complicated that the 1-2 sentence description in the contract. If items become truly more complex, I would like to give realistic timeframes on configuration completion without overstretching my already-too-small team, given many of them are pulled on other workstreams in the project. Keep in mind - the workstream that I have described above is NOT the critical path - there is about a 16 week difference between this workstream and our critical path. A 2-3 week extension of configurations would not affect the overall project timeline.
This is where my Director and I are butting heads. Her response to this rebaseline activity is that the timeline MUST remain at 20 days, no matter how complex configurations could be. When I ask "But what if that is not enough time?", her response is that we will pull resources from other teams to get things done quicker. All the while, I have been waiting 18 months to get a fully-staffed team. So the promise of these new resources falls on deaf ears to me.
Now I have a team that is very stressed about this looming timeline, as they already believe they will not have enough time to get the configurations done. I have told them that the task list is our main argument against the timeline, but tension is still palpable as I talk to them each day.
Misery loves company, so any advice or general complaints about a similar situation are welcome. All in all, I am looking for a new job. The client is an absolute pain to work with (but that is an entirely different post), but I do have good stability in my job right now.