The Mindset

Don’t you just love planning? Creating a fancy Gantt Chart, placing every task and every resource in its place. Feeling that you are in control, and that you have it all figured out. Then, you publish your plan, print the Gantt on a big poster and hang it where everyone can see what he or she needs to do and when it has to be done.

At about the same time you send your plan to the nearest plotter, something changes: someone updates the requested feature list, a more important project “steals” one of your resources, a departmental fun day is scheduled in the middle of an important task – you name it. In a couple of weeks, your perfect plan will be hanged on the wall like a modern-art work: many lines, colors and shapes, which have nothing to do with the real world.

If by this point you think I argue that project planning is futile and should therefore be avoided you cannot be further away from the truth. There is no way to survive a software project (or any project for that matter) without good planning. However, the reality we work in is too complex to be printed on a static poster decorating your office walls. A much better way to deal with this uncertain reality is to use a dynamic project plan.

A dynamic project plan will enable you to change it as the project advances. It will make it easy to change tasks, change their assignments, their dependencies and their status. A dynamic project plan will warn you when something gets wrong, and will immediately provide you with feedback on the potential impact this might have on the project. A dynamic plan will not settle for showing you what you planned, but will also show you the status of the project and the current projection on its completion. A dynamic project plan is a tool not only for planning, but also for ongoing project management and decision-making. A dynamic project plan is a living entity.

A living project plan is an abstract concept. You can achieve it manually simply by constantly updating your plan with data gathered from your team and other resources. A better approach, however, would be to use a mechanism that will help you automate many of the tedious details of monitoring tasks’ status and resources availability. Such a system should warn you whenever something is not working as planned. Then, it is up to you as a project manager to solve (or mitigate) the problem.

So, next time you are planning a project, use some automated collaborative tool for helping you managing the project dynamically, and use the extra wall-space for some fine art instead of a boring (and soon to be irrelevant) Gantt Chart.