The Secret to Making Project Planning Matter

Precise and condensed communication is the secret to great project planning.

A project plan starts out inside someone’s head. It is an idea of how to get things done. It then moves from there to a mock schedule, a more fully fleshed out task list of steps that need to be taken. This task list is written out on the planner’s desk or their computer. In larger organizations it may take place within a project management office or project planning department.

The plan may include a whole range of variables like resources attached to tasks, risk margins, acceptable schedule variances.

But these are details.

The important aspect to understand about this part of the planning process is that it is confined within the person who conceived the plan, or the specialized project planning office. There is no communication. Its all in one person’s head or within a department of people who speak the same language.

The next step in planning is the most crucial. This is where planning makes a case for itself as either an integral, value-add to the company or just another wasted expenditure on the latest corporate fad.

From here, the plan has to leave the specialist’s world and be communicated to someone else. It has to be told to a team of people who are going to do the work on the project. Or it may have to be explained to management for their input. Either way, the project planner (either an individual or a planning or project management office) has to make somebody else understand the plan.

This is where it gets tricky.

The original planner understands the intricacies of the project and wants to convey every nuance they’ve put into the plan. Unfortunately, this is often way too much information and rarely helps the receiver of the communication understand the plan.

Or, the project planner may present the plan straight off their desk or computer, in whatever format or program they used to plan the project, and expect the other person or the team to get it off the bat, to speak the same language they do. They expect the other people to understand the same set of symbols, triangles, arrows and circles which the trained project planning expert may use.

This doesn’t work either.

The team the planner is talking to has their own language, their own skills and its foolish to demand they speak the project planner’s language. Its not their job. It’s the project planner’s job.

Its up to the project planner to condense their ideas. Gear your communications so that people can first understand the fundamentals of the plan. People can build off that foundation later once the big blocks are understood.

It is up to the project planner (or project planning or management office) to be well versed in the language of the people they’ll be talking to so that the plan has context and can start to make sense to them. After all, unless the planner is also the company management and the project resource and the customer paying for the results, it doesn’t really matter how well they understand the plan. It only matters that they help other people do their jobs so that everyone can move the company forward.

It takes precise and condensed communication.

Focus on the big blocks of the plan. Don’t get carried away with the details or the higher level tools of the project planning trade. Know your audience and speak to their needs.

Once a plan is communicated properly, and the people get it, you’d be amazed at the kind of creative brainstorming that can result. When people with other skills, the people who are going to do the work on the project understand the plan, mistakes and errors can be planned out. Obvious roadblocks can be avoided and the effectiveness of the deliverables increased markedly.

In the executive suite, if the plan is understood, the project can be better directed toward corporate goals. Also, otherwise hidden implications of meeting those goals can be uncovered and re-evaluated in new light.

And it will all be attributable to great project planning well communicated plans.

          

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Workplace, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.