Common Mistakes in Project Planning

It was my privilege once again to discuss Common Mistakes in Project Planning on the invitation of Black & Scot, a non-profit organization based in Northern Ireland.

The webinar drew participants from minority group in the UK and other parts of the world.

“A primary purpose of planning is to produce a shared understanding of the project in the team.” ~ James Lewis

In this second session of the series on Project Planning we covered such items as:

• The What and Why of Project Planning,
• Project Scheduling Best Practices,
• What Makes a Good Project Plan?
• Common Mistakes in Project Planning.

Well, just as every project has its objectives, the webinar had objectives as shown below.

The participants learnt that Project Planning is about determining what needs to be done, by whom, and by when, in order to achieve project objectives. Scheduling, on the other hand, deals with the who and the when of doing the job.

The webinar addressed the qualities of a good project plan by examining the quality of its major deliverable - the project schedule. We did this by reviewing the 10 Best Practices of Project Scheduling.

“The biggest project planning mistake is to not make a plan.”?~ Mike Clayton

Finally, we reviewed the common mistakes in project planning, including:

• Not planning at all.
• Unfounded optimism aka ‘Optimism Bias’.
• Planning done as a one-man-show - the sole responsibility of the planning engineer.
• Application of commercial or even inhouse estimating norms without consideration for peculiarities of resources and environment.
• Not involving stakeholders - subject matter experts, supervisors and foremen.
• Not dealing with project or schedule risks.
• Poor documentation of project and schedule assumptions by the proposal team, and handover to project team upon contract award.
• Ignoring historical performance trends whereas historical performance trend is the only realistic and unflattering prediction of future performance.
• Unrealistic schedule resulting from imposition of unrealistic completion date by sponsors and the project team accepting and working back from the target completion date even when it is clear the program is unrealizable.

I believe that you may have other common mistakes of project planning. We would be glad to learn about them in your comment.