Project Management: No Room for Haste, Planning Always Wins

Winging It

Ever had one of those days when you just wanted to ‘wing it?’ I think we all have. My oldest son wanted to just ‘wing it’ on his first attempt at passing the written driving test for his license. That didn’t work. My 3^rd son wanted to just ‘wing it’ on his graduation speech. That didn’t work too well either. When my kids want to just ‘wing it’ on getting their chores done without looking at the checklist, something usually gets missed. I’ve seen organizations who were overconfident just ‘wing it’ on a proposal for new work with an established customer and I’ve seen that fail miserably.

I’ve come to the conclusion that just ‘winging it’ is usually not a good idea. We’ve all heard the quote…”Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Sounds solid to me. Likewise, being too hasty in making decisions or moving forward is usually not a good idea either. Proverbs 19:2 states “Zeal without knowledge is not good; a person who moves too quickly may go the wrong direction.” How true is that?! Wow…the Bible even applies to Project Management…gotta love that!

Everyone Needs a Plan

I’m not talking about micro-management here…that’s for sure…but everyone needs a plan. Everyone usually works better with a plan. We all work better with a job description, right? Even if we have one of those jobs where we get to basically write our own job description, we still need something on paper because that’s what we’re measured against. That’s how someone determines if we’re doing a good job or not and it usually helps us to get a raise (or not!).

The same goes for a project. We need a budget we’re measuring against. We need resource hours and forecasts we’re measuring against. We need a project schedule with milestone dates and tasks laid out for our team so that we can measure our progress against it. And we need requirements to build against, otherwise we don’t know what we’re building and we certainly won’t know when we’re done building. Without a plan, the work may never end.

Planning is Key

This all brings us back to planning is key. It starts at the beginning of the engagement and never ends until deployment has been achieved. Why? It would be great if you could put together a project plan at the beginning of the engagement that would never need changing. That would mean that requirements never changed, resources never changed, and the customer – or your company – never did anything to alter the course of your project. That, of course, never happens. In fact, on a typical project, I probably tweak the project schedule a couple of times a week due to slight changes and new information that comes out of status meetings with the team or customer…or both.

Some key reasons why planning never ends during a typical project:

• Customer requirements change
• Resources move on/off the project
• Funding for the project changes
• Availability of a key input to the project changes or is pushed out (resource, data, etc.)

Not Too Fast…Plan First

Moving too fast too early is not a good thing. On small projects – especially internal projects for a business unit within my own organization – I’ve had skilled development resources that wanted to move forward with work on the solution before I’ve had a chance to work through all the requirements with the project sponsor. Moving too fast too early like that can take us back to that 2^nd part of Proverbs 19:2… “a person who moves too quickly may go the wrong direction.” Re-work is costly and frustrating and it adversely affects the project timeline….as well as customer satisfaction. Create a plan, enforce and manage to that plan and keep your team focused on that plan. “Winging it” just isn’t an option for the Project Manager.

Related posts:

1. Should We Give the Customer What They Want?
2. The Requirements Frustration Factor
3. Project Communication Series: Planning Meeting Agenda
4. When Planning isn’t Enough
5. A Quick Guide Project Management Methodology