A corollary to “Planning is Easy.”

The difference between planning and executing a project is that the former can be done by one person.

The latter, doing the work, is done by a team. Each team member is an expert at their job and  may not see the need for anybody else’s input on their work.

That’s why communication is important.  If you want your planning to have value, a project manager needs to be a good communicator.

Without communication skills, planning is an illusion.

There are 20 management processes when planning a project and only 8 for doing the work (PMBOK Guide, 4th edition).  Yet, an overwhelming percentage of total resources and dollars are spent in doing the work.

That tells you how well defined planning can be and how messy it can get to do the work.

But everything important that happens for the customer, the whole reason for the project, is the work itself.  Get that right, and the project is a success.

Putting out fires is not risk management (it’s poor planning).

Before you kick-off your project, ask for the problems that could arise.

Don’t just think about them. Ask everyone involved on your project team. Ask your customer. Ask the project sponsor.  Ask experts who have done these kind of projects before.

Ask for the problems.  Make a list of them. Then figure out ways they can be solved when they happen. Put these solutions right next to the problems on the list.  Keep the list handy if/when problems arise.

Take a look at your project plan and see if there’s anything you can change that will reduce the chance of the problems happening. But keep in mind, that every change brings with it potential new problems.

This process is called Risk Management.   Contrary to popular belief, Risk Management is not about managing problems when they arise.  It’s about looking for them beforehand and being prepared for when they happen.

Like any part of a project, planning and preparing early on saves money, time, morale and headaches, as opposed to be surprised by problems and dealing with them on-the-fly.

There’s an interesting phrase in the PMBOK Guide (Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, 4th Edition) when it comes to the  amount of time activities take to get done. It uses the term “work periods” instead of hours, days, weeks or months. This intentionally broad term is there for a reason. (Though the PMBOK Guide does seem intentionally obtuse sometime.)

The reason it’s so broad is that every project and every general type of activity has its own time period that makes sense for it.  Some activities get done in hours, some in days, some in weeks.

By keeping the term broad, the PMBOK Guide gives us discretion in choosing the time period that makes the most sense for our project. It recognizes the difference between the units of effort required for different activities, and in doing so, emphasizes that no matter what type of activity, project management processes can help. That is, the body of knowledge of project management has something to say about every type of activity, regardless of the length of time it takes to do it.

This is also a heads up that picking the right unit for the time periods on our projects is an important part of the planning and scheduling process.

What makes a good plan?
A good plan maps out the steps to get something done, builds in mechanisms to accommodate risk and paints a picture of how to do things better.

Why make a plan?
A plan shows you how to get things done, despite things going wrong and with an eye to continual improvement.

On a philosophical level:
A good plan is an exercise in optimism and an expression of our belief in our ability to always move ahead.

Planning is a critical component to being a successful innovator.

It sounds counter-intuitive.

You might think that innovation is all about inspiration and the eureka moment. But its not. Its about executing.  To paraphrase Seth Godin, real innovators ship. That is, real innovators get things done.  And often.  The more often you deliver something, the better you’ll become at delivering more in the future.  Your ability to innovate and implement real change will increase.

The problem with relying on inspiration is that it is often fueled by emotion alone. Soon, those emotions fade. Or, they become harder to generate as problems arise. Then you get stuck.

If everything is on the fly, you are always late.

You can never execute and ship as fast as your ideas come.  Rely on inspiration and you’ll get frustrated when things take longer than “now.”

You need to build project plans. You need to plan the next steps.  That way you won’t get frustrated when things take longer than “now.”  You’ll be able to keep moving forward even when you hit set-backs.

The plan will be in place. You’ll know where to pick up from and where you want to go.

You might have to modify it. Actually, you’ll most certainly have to modify it.  But you’ll have a baseline to move forward on.

The plan doesn’t have to be elaborate. In fact, I would caution against getting too carried away. Many great ideas never became reality due to “paralysis from analysis or over-planning and under executing.

How much planning is enough?

You’ll learn over time as you see one plan be too constrictive or the other too loose, and therefore useless.  Just be conscious of the plan and gauge its success at helping you deliver.  That’s one of the advantages of having a planning. You have something to tweak and improve.

Often enough, whether you can get the idea done or is more a reflection of your plan, and not of your idea.

By consistently measuring the outcome of different plans and tweaking the plan over successive iterations, you’ll find the right plan. You’ll find the mix that allows you to innovate and ship your ideas.

Not every idea you ship will be a hit.   But by shipping, you’ll at least be in the marketplace. You will be executing and delivering innovation. You will have the satisfaction and fulfillment of seeing your ideas through to their fruition.

This, in turn, will give you confidence to try the next idea. And the next. And soon, you will have a steady process to deliver innovation.

Tasks lists can be super helpful for creative firms or creative departments (e.g. art departments, interactive agencies, internal marketing or communications) to get more done, manage processes better and to get better information on their work (including tracking billable hours). They can also kill well meaning attempts at implementing project management.

People usually get tripped up by making task lists overly detailed, trying to map every single step in a process. On the other end of the pendulum, people make tasks are so broad that they become meaningless and don’t add any value to getting things done or to providing information to managers.

For project management efforts to succeed in a creative environment, you have to get the task list right. It has to be the right balance between a traditional work breakdown structure (WBS) and an MS Excel based to-do list.

The way to figure out the right combination is to start out by deciding exactly:

A. Why you want a task list i.e. what you are using the list for and

B. What do you want to track i.e. what kind of information you want to track on your projects.

Here are a few of the things tasks lists can be used for along with some guidelines for building truly usefull tasks lists and project schedules around them.

1. Creating Templates. Templates make life so much easier. Once you’ve come up with the right level of detail on your task list, make a template out of it and re-use it for every project. If you do several different kind of projects, create different templates for each one.

Templates have a ton of benefits.

• Templates make it fast and easy to populate a schedule with tasks, dates and even resources and time estimates;
• Templates provide consistent names of tasks so that you can run task reports that compare the status of the same task across all projects and you can;
• Compare how long specific tasks take on one client versus the other or one project versus the other.

2. Categories for Entering Time. The task list becomes a framework for items your team can enter time on. As a rule of thumb, each task should be something to which at least 20 hours of time will be spent. Group together related activities to make up those 20 hour plus tasks e.g. “Browser Testing of Website” instead of “Testing Website on Safari”, “Testing Website on IE8″ etc. On projects lasting 3 months or more, the threshold for a task should be 40 hours or more.

If multiple people are assigned to the same task or if different bill rates are used on different projects, use work types or categories of effort to distinguish the work one person does on a task from the work another person does on a task.

3. Controlling a Process. Here, the manager or team lead creates a task list so they can monitor and give team members specific direction on the steps they need to take. This is an illusion. A manager can specify the projects, goals and deliverables on a project but it is pretty near impossible to make a list of all the tasks that go into the work a creative professional does. Set up major goals as milestones or critical tasks. This will make it easier to track progress (see next item).

That’s not to say that a manager can’t better manage the resources on a creative team. But instead of trying to map out every step of the process, focus on prioritizing which projects and deliverables are most important. This will get you a lot farther than telling someone which steps of the process to work on.

To get a handle on how long a process takes or where there might be room for improvements, spend time with the creative professional to understand how they do their work. Be open to learning, start a dialogue with the professional and be constructive in working together to find process improvements.

4. Track Progress on a Project. Here, the task list is a tool to get a sense of how far along you are in the process of producing specific deliverables. Given the above mentioned difficulty of listing every step that goes into the creative process, focus on having the team members give you an update on the percent complete of a task or deliverable.

For example: instead of having 10 subtasks under “Testing a Website” and determining percent complete by seeing how many of the 10 subtasks are checked-off as done, creating a single milestone task called “Testing a Website” and have the team member enter in that they are 40% done with that task.

(Project management geek-out note: If you track actual versus estimated hours on tasks, as well, you can compare the number of hours used against percent complete to get even more information. This is back of the envelope earned-value management.)

Flagging a few tasks as milestones or as critical tasks will help you focus your project management efforts on those items that impact delivery the most. And if you have trouble getting team members to update the status of all tasks, asking them to update the status of only milestone or critical tasks can be much more palatable.

A Word About Schedules
As a side note, much of traditional project management and traditional management software (like MS Project) will use a critical path to auto calculate a schedule. This idea comes from a world where processes flow linearly and in a relatively predetermine way -and where people often have a small number of things on their plate. This isn’t the case with art departments, agencies, marketing, interactive or with just about any creative processes in general. For a creative group, project management can’t really be about critical path. Its more about getting the right information on a process, increasing efficiencies, great delivery and making good decisions. Other approaches can stifle.

In a creative process, therefore, instead of an auto-calculated critical path, the schedule should be determined

• By your commitment to your client (whether internal or external) and
• Critical tasks should be those which you manually indicate as being of critical importance to your project and schedule.

This gives you and your team the room to apply your own experience and expertise to setting up a project schedule. While, on the other hand, you’re still setting up crucial project gateways that need to be met to effectively track progress, manage the project and delivery on time.

I’ve often said that managing the active phase of a project is the most crucial part of a project’s lifecycle.  This is when the project’s goals are being worked on. Some have argued that planning is the most important phase. That good planning can take care of anything. An incident on the most recent spacewalk by NASA seems to prove my point.

Two astronauts went out on a spacewalk to fix a particular part on the Hubble Telescope. The part that needed repair was blocked by a handrail. To get to the part, they had to unscrew the handrail. But, of course, the bolt that held the handrail onto the telescope was stripped. They couldn’t use any of their tools to get it off. The plan called for them to use a tool to unscrew the bolt. But it wasn’t working. Eventually, they had to resort to brute force, yanking the handrail off with old fashion muscle, in order to get to the part. They called it ”Plan C.”

My wife and I cracked-up when we heard this. The same thing always seems to happen to our household projects. Nothing ever goes as planned, things take longer and you often have to come up with innovative solutions to achieve your goals (which sometimes involved brute force).  Even with the huge budget, master planners and technical information that NASA has, things don’t always go as planned.

Why is this important?  It has a direct impact on how you structure your projects, the techniques you use and the tools you use for managing projects.

Recognizing that the active phase is the most crucial part of a project’s lifecycle, means that the flow of information from team members to the project manager, and back again, is of utmost importance. It is only by having accurate information that the project manager can understand the situation and implement changes as needed.

Without good information, those astronauts would probably be stuck trying to build a tool that could unscrew the bolt, to go according to plan, rather than just getting the job done.

Plan for Success

Your project management plan is your bible for success. Without it, there will not be a project because without a workable plan, you have no way to reach your goal. Your plan must start at with the goal that you want to achieve. Then, break down that go into workable segments. Set a timeline for each segment. Your team should know these timelines and adhere to them. This does not mean that you make a mad dash between segments. You want to allow enough time for these various stages to be achieved while still being able to meet the overall deadline. Remember, you can rework your plan to find better ways to get you where you need to be.

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Nowadays, more than ever, people need to have effective time management skills. This is especially important when it comes to students. Whether you’re working on your associates degree, bachelors, graduate degree or going through job retraining, time management plays an important role in a successful educational experience.

Often students are juggling numerous things. They of course have their academics. Then there’s family and friends, and oftentimes a job. Depending on the amount of classes you are taking this can be an enormous task.

For time management to be effective you will need to schedule your normal activities, plus your class time, time for your assignments, work, etc. School will be a large part of your time management.

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