It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on this blog. I took a summer hiatus from writing but am now happily back writing and sharing ideas. Looking forward to posting regularly again!
Later this week I’ll be flying to South America to lead a multi-day project planning workshop. It’s an opportunity to get together with a project team for a few days to identify the major activities and milestones on the project and to develop a well thought out plan for the project. I enjoy this type of work on projects – I find it professionally rewarding and the project teams I work with are generally quite receptive to the work. I don’t need to tell you about the benefits of project planning in helping clarify scope, activities, and dependencies between stakeholders. Especially in the early stages of projects, planning is a critical function.
So: in a nutshell, project planning is necessary, and project planning is good.
But.
There’s a dark side to planning. I’ve felt it for a while but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. This feeling crept up when people spouted feel-good idioms like “plan the work, work the plan.” It crept up in lessons-learned discussions when failures were consistently blamed on inadequate planning, irrespective of the actual amount of time spent planning. It crept up every time something happened that we didn’t anticipate, which again was blamed on inadequate planning.
Then one day it hit me: The dark side of planning is a widespread misunderstanding on the limitations of planning.
These aren’t easy words to say. In the capital project world, doubting the efficacy of detailed planning efforts will quickly get you labelled a heretic. So I’m careful with my words.
Without proper planning, projects are far less likely to succeed. Specifically, early planning in a collaborative setting will greatly improve project performance. However, the limitations of planning need to be identified and understood.
I discuss these limitations below. What’s interesting is that when I bring these points up with clients or colleagues, they frequently say something like “Oh, of course. That’s just obvious.” Despite the supposed obviousness of these points, I’m continually amazed at our outsized expectations of planning efforts, and how widely we retrospectively attribute project failures to a lack of planning.
Here are my thoughts on the limitations of planning. Each of these could be an article in itself, so I may expand on these in future posts.
- Your plan is almost certainly wrong.
A plan is a model of future events, and as the old maxim from statistics goes, “All models are wrong. Some are useful.” While your project plan should be useful, no amount of planning will make you clairvoyant. Seriously. When projects don’t go according to plan, we blame either our faulty plans or project management abilities. Perhaps it’s neither – maybe it just that planning is imperfect at best, and the results are less of a roadmap than they are light to help show the path forward. More often than not, the valuable part of planning is in the brainstorming and communication required to build the plan. As Dwight Eisenhower said: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
- More planning doesn’t always mean better plans.
You’ve heard of analysis paralysis? Where you get stuck in a spiral of planning and analyzing scenarios, but you never get anything done and despite your effort your plans don’t actually get any better? Yeah, that happens in project planning frequently. Here’s the thing to remember – there are diminishing marginal returns to time spent planning. Planning in early phases is highly beneficial, but I’ve seen projects with substantial time and money spent retooling plans without an understanding of how it was helping facilitate management decisions or improve project management. The trick is to find that sweet spot where planning hours provide management good information to begin execution, and then focus on managing risks and exceptions as the project unfolds.
- Your plans will (almost) always be optimistic.
Years ago two psychologists won a nobel prize by coming up with the concept of the “planning fallacy.” Look it up here, you’ll find the details fascinating. Without going into too much detail, the planning fallacy says that we have a strong tendency to underestimate the time it will take to perform an activity or series of activities, and our schedules will be optimistic because of this. The real kicker is that even when we have knowledge of the planning fallacy, we don’t do a good job of self-correcting and building more realistic plans!
Hopefully the point above provide some insight into how scheduling can go wrong. In the next article I’ll talk about how we got stuck in the control-centric approach to project planning and I’ll share some ideas for how we can improve it. Here’s a teaser: we need to focus less on trying to predict the future and more on learning and adapting as uncertain future events unfold.