The Disconnect between Processes and Planning

Working with many companies and project managers over the years, I observed a consistent disconnect between company processes, project planning and execution. This partially occurs due to unfamiliarity with the processes, time crunch causing employees to deviate from the process or bypass them completely or project manager getting prompts directly from the working level and building the plan based on that input thus forgetting the process as well.

Typically companies invest months or even years as well as thousands of dollars developing their processes. These process are the culmination of compliance to quality standards, in house knowledge, industry best practices and scientific methods. They are typically developed by brining external consultant in to collect information from different teams and management, reference the required compliances and regulations required and thousands of hours and dollars are sunk into them. The result of this effort tend to be a document of sort that verbally explains the steps in general terms and a phase-function swim lane diagram the demonstrate the work flow and decision points between different roles or functions during the execution phases of the process. This diagram by itself illustrates multiple key items for project planning. It demonstrates

1. The required inputs,
2. The necessary stakeholders inside the task,
3. The key tasks and activities required to execute the process,
4. The dependencies between these tasks and activities,
5. The responsible party for executing a specific task or activity, and
6. The output of the process.

A project manager should be able to leverage these 6 points from the processes published by the company and translate it into the basic form of the project plan. While this is not true for each project and definitely not every company, companies should be able to build a repository of estimates over time using their processes and project plans that would allow them to determine the normal distribution of these tasks and activities. This in turn will allow the project managers to have a clear estimate of the best, normal and worst expected resources and resource loading required for each task. With this, the project manager can determine multiple things:

1. The critical path,
2. The amount of resources needed,
3. The sufficiency of the budget,
4. The risk to the timeline and milestone achievement, and
5. The priorities they need to address to ensure the project success.

Unfortunately, with the approached currently practiced and the tools present the whole framework does not execute as intended. This requires education, training, execution rigor and preferably as well a tool that supports this and be able to automatically build the project plan from the process as an initial draft at kick off.