The Disciple of Project Planning and Journaling

At a business meeting last week, the presenter asked attendees to make a list of how to make a peanut butter sandwich. Too simple? Come and see people fumbling. It quickly occurred to me that most of us have never had the time to plan for that or write down the steps for making a sandwich. What about planning your day, virtual meeting, a trip, business plan, having a robust strategic plan for your business, or project management plan. My project management glasses were handy.

An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan. - Warren Buffett

In fact, about 26% of our project should be devoted to planning, daily and in most projects, and depending on the complexity and the life cycle approach you adopt and planning variables like development approach, project deliverables, organizational requirements, market conditions, legal or regulatory requirements, etc.

Notes on planning and writing it down.

1.????????????Vision is written, thoughts are repeated, and often jokes

2.????????????What you don’t write down, you lose.

3.????????????You will never get the details until you write them down

4.????????????Planning gives wings to ideas; words alone or speaking gives air.

5.????????????The seriousness of ideas is seen in the details in which it was written

6.????????????You never know what you know until you write it down.

7.????????????You don’t know what you are doing until it is on paper.

8.????????????You can’t measure what is not written down

9.????????????You cannot plan from a big idea in your head. Write it.

10.?????????Action follows the paper.

11.?????????You cannot make “plane” a vision that is not written down

12.?????????If you ever have Alzheimer, what’s left is your notes

13.?????????If you don’t want people to know your ideas, write a book?

14.?????????If you want to make something eternal, write it down.?

15.?????????Plan: My book has a chapter dedicated to Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). You’ll see how to journal your daily victory notes and personal knowledge register—the Knowledge Café.

For me, planning and journaling are interwoven with preparation. I plan for everything. It’s an oxymoron to manage projects without a plan.

I remember planning a $10 million small business loan project years ago. My boss was frustrated with the initial processes before the project’s execution because he thought those planning activities were a waste of time. No, they are not. He asks us to leave all the planning and jump into execution. My defense: if you skip the necessary planning of a project, you set yourself up for failure.

It’s at the planning stage that you define, prepare and coordinate all subsidiary plans that answer the questions of how you are going to manage communication, cost, HR, procurement, process improvement, quality, requirement, risk, schedule, scope, cost, the baselines—cost, schedule, and scope baselines, and updates—and integrate them into the overall PM plan.

The purpose of planning is to proactively develop a method or how you will define and create the project deliverables.

They say that failure to plan is planning to fail.

For instance, during your initial planning, you may consider social, financial, and environmental impacts or triple bottom line on the project., product life cycle assessment, materials and processes impacts, etc.

Planning documents, organizes, elaborates, and coordinates project work throughout the project life cycle. Per PMBOK 7the edition, “The Planning Performance Domain addresses activities and functions associated with the initial ongoing, and evolving organization and coordination necessary for delivering project deliverables and outcomes.”

Planning is at the center of the relationship between project management principles and project performance domains. A performance domain is a group of interactive, interrelated, and interdependent activities that are critical for the effective delivery of project outcomes like stakeholders, teams, project work, delivery, measurement, and uncertainty—PMBOK 7th Edition.

Whether you are using the adaptive development approach, also known as an evolutionary approach— agile life cycle or predictive approach—waterfall, planning is at the center of any successful value delivery of products, services, or results. No one cares about the astuteness of your deliverables unless it’s a “value.

The life cycle you selected determines and impacts your planning. The predictive life cycle undertakes the bulk of the planning up front and then continues to replan by using rolling wave or progressive elaboration. As risks—threats and opportunities materialize, you adjust your plans accordingly.

If you want to reduce or eliminate uncertainties in your projects, then you may consider the development approach and delivery cadence. When there is so much uncertainty in stakeholders’ acceptance of the deliverable, your best options will be an iterative approach where you release a minimum viable product to the market and incorporate users’ feedback before developing additional features or functions.

But when deliverable has to meet regulatory requirements, you do not have the luxury of incorporating users’ feedback as in the case of road construction. Your best option is a predictive approach. There may be some elements of this that can pass the test of the iterative approach.

Summary

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” –?Peter Drucker

If you did your planning well,

• You know what the heck you are doing.
• Project transparency enhances team and stakeholder buy-in.
• You have a documented plan to show for it.
• It means there is intentionality—your project—and your life progresses in an organized, coordinated, ?and deliberate manner.
• Time spent planning must match or is appropriate for the situation. The circumstance determines the amount of time spent planning any project. We don’t use a gun to shoot a fly.
• There is a holistic approach to delivering the project outcome rather than random acts.
• Information that evolves from the planning is elaborated to produce the deliverables and outcomes for which the project was undertaken.
• There is a process for adopting plans throughout the project based on a margin and changing needs in all conditions.
• Information from your planning is sufficient to manage stakeholder expectations without gold plating.

Let me know what you think. Read PMBOK 7th Edition for more.

If you like this, you’ll like my book, The Knowledge Cafe: Create an Environment of Successful Knowledge Management

#TheKnowledgeCafe #KnowledgeManagement #KnowledgeCafe #PMI #PMBOK7 #planning #journaling https://www.benjaminanyacho.com