This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
An effective plan/guide is merely a model of current expectations, and only as "good" as its most recent/regular/frequent update. In my new real world position, I'm quickly falling into the practice of "JIT" planning for any but the most repeatable projects, with a high level, loose plan that is fleshed out as knowledge allows and time requires.
What is different about your new context that's encouraging to adopt that practice?
Given what you're learning, if you were to return to your previous context, would you return to your old way of planning, or would your new learnings apply there, too?
Damn, Dale...Good questions.
Let's just say part of the difference in context is going from being some know-it-all consultant to actually doing this stuff on a day-to-day basis.
But seriously, folks...
As I think about it, a major difference is that the kind of project environments that I was consulting in until recently were typically product development projects with project durations measured in months (or even quarters) and in large, slack-filled, externally constrained Fortune 100 firms, while my new job is about projects that are measured in weeks in a very busy fast-growing, internally constrained 31-person interactive marketing and web services development company.
There's something about being able to take the core team of a large effort through 3 to 10 days to plan a 9-month-to-a-year project in relative detail versus having to have a high-level plan ready 3 to 5 days after a contract is signed for a client kickoff meeting, at which we learn more about what the client is capable of and what they think we've sold them for delivery in 6 weeks. (One of my objectives in my project and process management role is to move some of that "high level" planning to into the selling/contracting process rather than after it. As a result, for the first time, PM (me) attends weekly sales pipeline reviews.)
One might say that my new environment "forces" a level of agility, although before I came aboard, there were very detailed plans replete with hard deliverable dates tied to every task. I've recently addressed a template for a class of quite repeatable projects here (something we've done enough with processes that have been refined to almost consider it "production" rather than projects...almost, but not quite), and we've turned what was a plan/schedule of over 120 lines to one of about half that size.
Regarding the second question, my use of Critical Chain Project Management allows the process to absorb the variation of changes and refinements along the way without a lot of anxiety. Also...to tell the truth...even the previous context often started with plans that were far more detailed in the early going than the later, and often used some delayed plan refinements, implemented after key decision points. So I was usually guiding clients along similar paths, although, as a consultant, I wasn't always around for the later stage refinements. Not really a huge difference if I were to "go back" to my old context.
Thanks for asking, Dale.
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