Project Management 101, Part 12: Nothing but Net - More on Project Planning

One of the more fun things I’ve done has been to coach youth basketball. I coached both boys and girls, from preschoolers to preteeners. When a friend mentioned he was coaching, I couldn’t help but jump on the opportunity offer some advice.

What probably made my teams standout and be somewhat successful was that we ran plays. Not just pass the ball to the best player, but plays intended to give everyone on the team the opportunity to score.

I ran the same five basic plays for every team and every season. Not that these plays were particularly brilliant: they were just simple for me to remember and, for the most part, seemed to work OK.

To mix things up, we would run the same plays on the left side. The point guard would come up the back court yelling the play number and holding up the same number of fingers (another reason to limits the number of plays to five). When we wanted to run the play on the left, the point guard would add “Lucy” to the play number. “ONE! ONE! ONE!”, or “THREE LUCY!, THREE LUCY!”. Every once in a while, we’d get creative: “TWO LUCY SPECIAL!”, just to mess with the other coach.

For warmups before the game, the team would run a weave instead of just a random shoot around. If you know what that that is and you can imagine a herd of first graders running a weave, you know what kind of terror that would strike in the opposing team.

In terms of W’s, some of the teams were more successful than others. But I think all the players had a sense of engagement and had the chance to score. And that was the intent after all.

So much of this relates to team building and project execution that it would fill volumes. But I’ll stick with two important concepts: strategy and planning.

The difference between a strategy and a plan is essentially concept vs. detail.

The strategy was to play an organized basketball game by running a variety of well-rehearsed plays.

The plan is to run the series of plays in a particular sequence to give everyone the opportunity to score. And if the game is close in the fourth, feed the hot hands for the win.

Most Project Managers have a basic strategy for their project in their heads. The strategy is the general plan to get to from the start to the end. But for the strategy to be effective, there really has to be some detailed planning. And the more detailed the plan is, the less risk there will be and, the outcome will be more predictable.

Two key documents make up an effective plan: the Project Execution Plan (PEP) and the Schedule.

Just the effort of writing out a narrative of what you’re going to do will trigger steps and problems you hadn’t thought of before. That’s why it a good reason to avoid using project planning templates.

A good PEP will be well received by the Team, especially as you outline what plays they get to run (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Likewise, a detailed schedule can be an eye-opener to what the real time constraints are to complete any project. And like the PEP, the details are what will identify and help you manage any risks to the project.

These two are the most valuable documents for any project. But they’re only useful if they are actually used and kept alive through out the project.

No coach gives up on their playbook.?