On many occasions through my career I've heard people tell me that they have given up with planning, because external factors would always
intervene which would break the original plan.
This is a bit like saying that you won't plan out a route on a map before a car journey because there will probably be a road closed somewhere along the route, which means that the route planned will have to change, so what's the point? As long as we know the destination, we'll get there somehow…
Planning, particularly in projects, is a continuous activity, not some process of divining the future. If you think that your first cut of the plan will be the one that gets you through, you're either very lucky or rather naïve. But planning is only one element of the necessary skills of the project manager, and for most projects probably of lesser importance.
If we come back to the idea of route navigation, the idea of maps these days is an increasingly old fashioned one. SatNav has taken over the windscreen of so many people's cars that the complicated origami ritual of refolding an Ordnance Survey roadmap is a skill that's being lost. SatNav not only can plan your route, but many these days also have the intelligence, data and processing power to be constantly replanning based on current flows of traffic ahead. The perfect project planner?
Well, not really. Planning, as well as being a constant activity, also needs to be a collaborative activity. That's one of the early keys to another chest in the project manager's armoury – influence.
My wife hates SatNav. And the reason, I think, that she hates it is because it is in no way participative in it's planning process. The smooth voice barks orders, and the driver needs to blindly follow its automated commands. You have to give up complete control to the authoritarian master.
How many project managers have you worked with who've taken that approach? And how much, exactly, did you hate them?
mmitII 