I was raised by two nurses, for the first 20 years my mother and for the last 25 my wife. Even though they attended nursing school decades apart they both learned a key rule on day one, “if it ain’t written down, it didn’t happen.”  This is the power of documentation, and why it is the primary mechanism a PM should use to defend their efforts. For better or worse there is a “start to start” relationship between documentation and CYA (cover your anatomy). The most powerful document any PM can produce is a valid, defensible project plan.


2. Lakein’s Law: Failing to plan is planning to fail. 

Alan Lakein is a self-help writer focusing on personal time management. Lakein is a proponent of dividing one’s tasks into lists of A, B, and C priorities to get the most important things done first. 


Avoiding the “Just Do It” Mentality

Too often an organization rushes planning and values the execution of the project above all else. From the outside, planners may appear to be doing nothing since a lot of time and effort go into producing only documents, but planning is how we deal with the temporary and unique characteristics of projects. Remarkably, in the classes that we run, project management is the most overlooked deliverable during the creation of the work breakdown structure (WBS). Project management should be a top-level element in the WBS with further decomposition focusing on the planning deliverables—generally documents—to emphasize the fact that work is being done and products are being created. The very first of these deliverables, the project charter, should initiate the link between the project’s vision and the necessity of planning. 


Planning to Plan: Setting Expectations in the Project Charter 

The project charter should address, in part, a summary milestone schedule, a summary budget, and assumptions.  The “project management plan approved” milestone should be a major element of any schedule since the plan defines how the project will be executed, monitored, and controlled. Likewise, if the planning process is to consume project resources rather than be treated as an overhead function, it should be a line item in the summary budget. In any case, an assumption should be written stating the organization’s willingness to support a given amount of effort to produce a valid project plan. Once this charter is approved the project manager can use it to defend their planning time instead falling prey to the “Just Do It” mentality. 


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Questions to Consider/Fodder for Comments


1. What other assumptions about planning should be in the charter?


2. What is project management’s real objective in terms of performance to plan?


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Next Post (ETA 8/23/10)

Examining Saint Exupéry’s Law             

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