Software projects very rarely both come in on time and budget and satisfy their end users. Its much easier to satisfy one of the above conditions, either living according to your original plan or adapting to the changing needs of your users. Satisfying both requires a certain amount of prescience. Demarco and Lister list Schedule Flaws as one of their 5 Risks of Software Project Management. In this article, we’ll discuss several symptoms and causes of schedule flaws, present metrics and diagrams that can be used to track your team’s progress against its schedule, and describe Agile ways to address this risk.