Oct 10, 2006
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Comic Lessons in Planning Projects: Picking the Right Project Planning Tool
Hiro Nakamura from NBC’s show Heroes has done the truly remarkable. The man from Yamagato Industries has broken all rules in project management and set new boundaries. Sure he can move time with his mind, bend the space time continuum and teleport. But yesterday he did something even more remarkable.
He executed a project using a comic book as the project plan.
Most project managers plan projects using some form of project management software or a Microsoft Project like tool. Even those that don’t use any project management software will, at least, use a spreadsheet like MS Excel to list all their tasks and keep note of their status. (These can get pretty complicated -as complicated as some project management software, with a variety of Excel Macros and built-in MS Excel functions set to automatically track and calculate the overall health of their projects.)
But Hiro used a comic book.
Some will say that he was able to execute so flawlessly because the comic book was an exact and perfect picture of the future. It told him what was going to happen. True, he does have the advantage of moving through time to take a peak.
But a good project plan, while not a perfect picture of the future, should be an accurate representation of the tasks and steps involved in getting from a to b, in getting a project completed and delivered. That means that project planning should be more than guesswork. Planning a project should be an exercise in applying past experience to a new goal, seeing what’s different, defining which variables could change on the project and planning for those changes.
The exact format in which the plan is written and recorded is less important than the process of planning the project and the act itself of going through project planning. Unfortunately, this how step of project planning is often overlooked.
For some people, the right format is some form of project management software or MS Project like tool. For others, it could be an MS Excel like spreadsheet they use for project management or tracking tasks. Or, it could even be a long list in an MS Word doc. or a physical folder with sticky tabs all over it (not the most elegant or efficient way -but hey, everyone’s got to start somewhere).
For Hiro, the right format and planning tool was a comic book. But that’s probably what makes him so super.
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