September 7, 2004
(Computerworld)
While a good plan is critical for successful delivery of a project, following a plan too blindly in the face of the inevitable changes that projects face can be a recipe for failure. The best project managers know that successfully taking a project from concept to completion requires not only a plan, but the willingness to deviate from that plan when conditions change and adaptation is necessary.
Maybe you've had a significant project follow its plan with no deviations from inception to completion. If so, you're in the minority. The reality of life is that change happens, whether from external or internal forces, and successful project managers accept and roll with change as a natural part of doing business. While a project without a plan is crippled from the start, a project that is managed solely to the plan, rather than to reality, usually becomes challenged and starts veering off track later in its life cycle. All too often, rigidly planned projects that are going off track devolve into an exercise whose purpose is to understand why the plan was deviated from, whose fault it is, how to get back on the now-unrealistic plan timeline and even whether to cancel the project, since it's "off plan." The plan has become an end rather than the means to a completed project, and when the plan itself is what was sold internally or externally as the justification for a project, it can kill the project even when the goal is still salvageable.
While a realistic project plan is the first criterion for a successful project, it's important to remember the military maxim that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Just as the great generals throughout history have won their battles by being the best at marshaling their resources on the fly to adapt to changing circumstances, great managers use their project plans as starting points that are then informed throughout the life of the project by feedback from engaged team members, management of the project's resources and regular reviews of the environment into which the project will be delivering its end product. Project managers who have the tools and the engagement to obtain a real-time view into the current state of their projects, their resources and their team activities will virtually always outperform managers who have a supposedly airtight plan but no such real-time insight. Planbound managers will always see the information through the filter of how the data varies from that predicted by their original plan, while realist managers will use the information to speed the project on its way to completion, regardless of whether the route taken or the timeline involved was envisioned in the project's planning stages.
Paradoxically, managers can often learn more from obsolete plans than they can from successful ones when it comes time to prepare for the next project. Using tools that allow them to capture data on actual behavior versus anticipated performance, managers can apply the lessons learned to the next project, hopefully making it more realistic and decreasing the degree of change management that they will need to apply the next time around. Successful project managers learn from their mistakes, their experience and the pain of past projects to make each successive project more efficient than the last.
Plans are good things to have, and tools that allow project managers to marshal resources and set timelines are critical. A smart manager, however, knows when and how to recognize when a plan has been overtaken by events, update the plan and proceed accordingly. Your ability to learn from history, leave the perfect plan and detour around the inevitable roadblocks can make the difference between a successfully delivered project and long meetings spent discussing what went wrong this time.