Four Plans
A post without a punchline
In every project, there exists, at one time or another, four different versions of a plan. Those are:
The plan you want to do
The plan you believe you can achieve
The view that people who don’t want a plan, believe leadership should be looking at
The plan you are told to deliver
The start and end dates are always different, and what is being delivered is rarely aligned with the expectations of everyone involved in the project.
Not one of those plans should be trusted. Let’s have a look at the reasons why.
The plan you want to do
The idea for a project usually comes from a financial or reputational risk decision point. Something is either costing too much money (licenses are the main culprit here) or, that old thing you have been using with offline processes and workarounds, is finally biting you on the backside.
You go into a meeting – often with someone called a CFO (Chief Financial Officer) and ask for 20% more than you need to deliver a new system, service or process. With the intention that they will automatically knock 20% off the asking price.
The CFO calls your bluff, and knocks 40% off the budget request, knowing you wanted an extra 20%, but also challenging you to do it for 20% less. This is what you have to run the project. Which means either less time, less people or less scope.
Your ideal plan is already scuppered.
The plan you believe you can achieve
With only 80% of the budget to pay for the thing you need, you realise you need to cut a few corners. Easiest way to do that is to reduce the scope. You do this by calling something that won’t meet the customer’s or user’s needs – an MVP.
You already know you are going to reduce the scope even further as the project progresses, before the first plan is printed out. Does that mean you have less than minimal? No, of course not. You simply re-baseline the concept of minimal until you have something live. As the project ends, you will be left with no budget to enhance what is there. The term “Business As Usual” is usually bandied around at this point.
Your plan is now shorter, or longer with less people, delivering less, or is it fewer, user needs and pain points. No, sorry. It’s more pain points.
The view that people who don’t want a plan, believe leadership should be looking at
Bit of a mouthful that one, but it’s the view often held in delivery teams that a senior leader should simply look at the tool you are using to capture your user stories. PowerPoint be damned.
The problem with this held view is that agile teams, if they are really that, never plan the whole project. So, when someone, let’s call them the CFO again, wants to know if they are getting value for money, or the team is on track. Telling them to look in Jira, or on a white board of post it notes, is going to throw up far more questions than it is answers.
Also, what about dependencies, comms, the other stuff on slides 38 – 52?
Knowing you have a backlog is not a plan. If you can plan your whole backlog, then you are not agile. It’s very much a cake and eat it view.
The plan you are told to deliver
In delivery, this is called a right to left view. You start with an end date and work out how to fill in the gaps. Plenty of cultures read right to left, but for most of you reading this, it would be like finding out who did it (it’s always the famous actor doing a guest role on a TV series) before you even know what it, is.
There are a great many reasons why right to left plans exists – financial, security, compliance – and then there is simply something someone said that they can’t go back on.
Your job, if you choose to accept it (you have no choice) is to take the plan you want to do, minus the plan you believe you can deliver, divided by the view that people who don’t want a plan, believe leadership should be looking at, and reach a date that cannot be moved.
Always remembering that each of the previous three plans are subject to change, even if the end date of the fourth plan is set in stone.
When you get to a certain level in projects, programmes, portfolios and deliveries, there are times when you are told the end date of the fourth plan via a public platform. I once found out that a project I was about to kick off, was given an end date by someone in Government, without telling anyone what was needed.
It was a title and a concept, without a plan – a prayer; a hope. But we still delivered on time. Just don’t ask what it was we delivered.
/END