Don’t waste your time planning!

Do you sometimes (or often!) hear the words, “Don’t waste your time planning, just get on with it!“? Do you agree? If not, do you know how to respond? This blog looks at one fundamental aspect of planning, the schedule plan, and explains why planning is vital.

What a well produced plan tells you
You will find the management of the schedule is one of the most important and fundamental of project management techniques. So much so that many people (wrongly) think that schedule management is project management. At a simple level, the schedule tells you how long the programme and project, or any part of it, will take. In addition to giving dates, a well produced schedule plan also tells you:

• who is accountable for every aspect of the programme or project;
• escalation routes;
• reporting channels;
• the approach being undertaken;
• the major deliverables from the programme or project;
• interdependencies (gives and gets);
• the timing of key review points and major decisions;
• payments;
• constraints (such as “freeze periods);
• benefits recognition points.

The schedule is also the basis on which cost and resource plans are constructed. However, unlike costs and resources, which are seen by only a few people, key dates are very visible. A well publicized delivery date is, when missed, very hard to hide. While “time” may not be the most important aspect on some projects, an observer may develop their own perception of “success” or “failure” purely from the performance against the publicized target dates. The ability to build and manage the schedule plan is one of the essential skills that all programme, project and team managers should have. Planning is far too important to delegate to junior team members, especially in the early stages when the overall strategy and approach are being developed. The plan sets the course for the remainder of the work.

The benefits of good planning
Done effectively, the schedule plan will benefit your sponsor, you and the team by providing:

• a   baseline against which to measure progress (without a plan, words such as “early” or “late” have no meaning);
• a common understanding of the approach being taken to achieve your sponsor’s objectives;
• a breakdown of the project workload into manageable pieces (work packages) based on the deliverables/outputs wherever possible;
• a clear way of showing interdependencies between activities and work packages within the project and to/from other external projects;
• a listing of accountabilities for different work packages and activities;
• a tool for evaluating when corrective action is needed.

Further, the actual activity of creating a plan by using the full team serves to forge a team spirit and a high level of common understanding and commitment.
Know your risks
All programmes and projects are undertaken within an environment of risk. Good planning is done in the full knowledge of those risks. You should therefore:

• avoid avoidable risks by planning the project in a different way;
• contingency plan for the unavoidable risks.

All organisations need to make provisions for risks in their financial accounts; without planning how can you know what these are?

Enough planning is enough
A good plan is not necessarily a detailed plan with lots of activities. Micro-planning can be damaging as it is time wasted. The granularity of the plan needs to reflect the risk associated with the work, the phase or stage of the work and the need for effective monitoring and control. A key tenet of planning is plan the immediate work in detail and the rest of the work in outline. This applies whether using “classic” or “agile” approaches.

Plans can change!
Once a plan is produced and agreed it should be baselined and used to gauge progress. However, that is not the end of the story. Things may change either within the project or outside it, which will cause us to re-plan and re-baseline. Never consider a plan to be fixed, but only introduce changes when you really know what the impact is.

Finding help in the Project Workout
Chapter 21 of The Project Workout covers schedule planning and the accompanying CD includes is a Microsoft Project template, which includes all the key “best practice” features described in the book.
Chapter 25 deals with change control.

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